In the 1960s, art dealers and publishers Aimé and Marguerite Maeght decided to create a private foundation that would showcase their collection, based on models they had seen in the United States. They were encouraged by Cubist artist Georges Braque who saw in the project a way for them to cope with the loss of their son Bernard, who died of leukemia in 1953. The first of its kind in France, the Fondation Maeght opened in July 1964. At its inauguration, then minister of culture André Malraux said, “This is not a museum, but a place made from love and for the love of art and artists.”

Today, the museum is home to some 13,000 objects, including 2,000 works by Joan Miró (the largest collection in France), as well as site-specific installations by Braque, Pierre Tal-Coat, Marc Chagall, Pol Bury, Germaine Richier, and Alberto Giacometti, whose sculptures fill the courtyard.

Closed on and off for the past seven months, the Fondation Maeght reopened its long-awaited expansion last month. “We had the idea for the expansion in 2004. It was what my grandfather wanted, but we could not find the right person for the job,” said Isabelle Maeght, the Maeghts’ granddaughter, during a press conference.

Designed by Paris-based firm Silvio d’Ascia Architecture, the new section adds 5,005 square feet to the museum’s footprint, without disturbing the original architecture by Josep Lluís Sert, who also built Miró’s studio in Mallorca. Instead, d’Ascia chose to dig four extra galleries under the existing building; the largest of which lies below the Giacometti courtyard. (They are only visible from the Chemin de Rondes, which runs behind the museum.) The largest one lies below the Giacometti courtyard.

“This is an extension project by subtraction,” d’Ascia said during the press preview. “As an architect it is important to know when to set one’s ego aside, especially in the face of an invisible project. I had to adopt a silent approach not to disrupt the foundation’s already perfect balance.”

These new underground galleries overlook a pine forest and the Mediterranean Sea, thus keeping alive the dialogue between art, nature, architecture that served as the foundation to the Maeghts’ vision for their museum.

Adrien Maeght, 94, the Maeghts’ son and current president of the foundation, added, “The basement rooms designed by Silvio d’Ascia have brought the site into the 21st century.”

The expansion will now allow the foundation to display its permanent collection (downstairs in the expansion) alongside temporary exhibitions (upstairs in the original building), like its current one for Henri Matisse and Pierre Bonnard. The new “Galerie de la Bibliophilie” opens the renovated building, showcasing selections from the 45,000 books in the foundation’s collection. Down a dozen steps are paintings by Pierre Soulages, Jean Paul Riopelle, Jean Messager, Fernand Léger, and others. The final room is dedicated to recent acquisitions, including a figurative painting by Hélène Delprat, who will be the subject of a solo show at the foundation by next spring.

The budget for the expansion project amounts to €5 million, including €1 million from Adrien Maeght and €500,000 each from the French state, the Provence-Alpes-Côte d’Azur region, and the Alpes-Maritimes department. The Dassault family also gave €1 million, through their “History and Heritage” fund, managed by the grandchildren of Marcel and Madeline Dassault who were friends of the Maeghts and attended the foundation’s 1964 opening. The company Triverio, which oversaw the original building’s construction 60 years ago, participated as corporate sponsors. “Without friendship this foundation would not even exist,” Isabelle Maeght said several times throughout the preview.

The theme of friendship also played a role in the Bonnard-Matisse exhibition, as both artists were friends with the Maeghts. “Bonnard and my father first met in Cannes in 1936 through a lithograph to be printed,” Adrien Maeght writes in the exhibition catalog. Bonnard then introduced Aimé Maeght to Matisse in 1943, but they only became close after Matisse and Marguerite randomly met in a doctor’s waiting room; “a man sat down next to her and asked her to pose for him,” and she soon became his “active agent.”

Today, about 40 drawings of Marguerite by Matisse remain; several of them are featured in the new collection hang. “At the age of fourteen,” Adrian continues in the catalog, “I had the privilege of attending one of these posing sessions and of making an eight-minute film—the only document I know of showing Matisse drawing.” Also on view is Matisse’s Le Buisson (The Bush), which hung above Bernard’s bed during his illness.

Featuring both artist’s landscapes and visions of Saint-Tropez’s light, self-portraits and several portraits of their recurring models, the exhibition mostly avoids pairing works by Bonnard and Matisse side by side. That’s intentional, according to the show’s curator, Marie-Thérèse Pulvenis de Sévigny, a former conservator at Nice’s Musée Matisse. The focus here is on the Maeghts and their relationship to the artists: Bonnard encouraged them to open a gallery in Paris, and Matisse was chosen for the inaugural show in 1945. “What matters here is the synergy between the three, which served as a springboard for the foundation,” she said.

Before being transformed into a showcase for paintings by the likes of Berthe Morisot, Claude Monet, Camille Pissarro, Alfred Sisley, Gustave Caillebotte, and many more, the Victor Laloux­–designed building played several roles in the life of the city. After being decommissioned as a station, it served as a reception center for prisoners after World War II, was a film set for Orson Welles’s 1962 movie The Trial, and was used as an auction venue while the Hôtel Drouot was closed. Its conversion into a museum was led by architects Renaud Bardon, Pierre Colboc, and Jean-Paul Philippon.

Here are 25 masterpieces in the Musée d’Orsay’s collection. (Please note that not all of these works are on view at a given time—we have indicated those that are currently displayed and where they may be found on this map.)

“The idea emerged from the feeling that we needed to try to do something different to grow as galleries,” Rosales told ARTnews. “We thought, instead of saying that a fair does not work for us, we should try to do something else ourselves.”

Even the fair’s name fits that spirit, taking it from the common art world adage “see you in June,” a reference to Art Basel, as well as being a play on Death in June, the name of a neo-folk band led by English musician Douglas. Upon the suggestion of a “well-placed” colleague, they add “Art Fair” to their project’s title.

The fair’s bunker was recently transformed into an exhibition space by Pritzker Prize–winning firm Herzog & de Meuron, and that is reason enough to visit. The elevator ride down three levels builds the suspense of seeing the wares brought by the 12 participating galleries, nearly half of them for the first time: Cento (Glasgow), Lagune Ouest (Copenhagen), Magician Space (Beijing), PALAS (Sydney), and Property Holdings Development Group (Hong Kong).

“It’s actually our first fair ever, and we could not be more excited,” Cento cofounder Grace Johnson said. The gallery is presenting a solo show of British artist Rhett Leinster, whose work incorporates paper he makes himself and pigment that he often grinds himself. These pieces draw inspiration from images found online that Leinster transforms into something else, like a bird that now looks like a landscape.

This year’s fair also decreased in size, having four exhibitors fewer than in 2023. “We could decide to cut the program in half, give each other more space, and just do the project with five galleries,” Rosales said, noting that the fair has a cost-sharing model that prioritizes the exhibitors’ needs.

Tokyo-based dealer Yugari Hagiwara (of Hagiwara Projects) is showing small works by British artist Gabriel Hartley, whose layered and textured paintings and ceramics call for slow contemplation. “I did well last year, so I am happy to be back,” Hagiwara said.

In her VI, VII booth, Rosales is showing Yu Shuk Pui Bobby video’s Genetic Salon I & II (2021–22), which questions perceptions around gender, the body, and identity, as well as a series of digital prints on porcelain inspired by Hong Kong memorial placards (ceramic tiles with portraits of the dead loved ones left at their graves). Rosales has also brought three abstract compositions by Norwegian painter Jorunn Hancke Øgstad, who uses fabric dye, resin, and plastics to mimic watercolor, spray paint, and print processes.

Frankfurt-based gallery Parisa Kind has returned to the fair, with a presentation that includes figurative ink-on-canvas works by German artist Isabelle Fein and a new series of abstract paintings by Benjamin Echeverria, who has recently begun depicting large dots, using the lids of paint cans to determine the shape of his patterns. 

What explains the loyalty of returning exhibitors? There is a certain sense of intimacy that pervades the fair. “It is a pretty cool fair,” said Frankfurt dealer Jacky Strenz, who has curated her booth as an homage to artist Lin May Saeed, who died in 2023. In her practice, which spanned various mediums, Saeed dedicated her work to advocating for the respect of animals. 

“We are a great group of galleries,” Kind said. “We hang out all the time. There is no competition between us. We help each other out. It does not feel like old friends getting together—we are old friends getting together.”

“We are witnessing a broadening of our collecting globally with new buyers entering the market, and securing a baseline of support for business alongside core audiences that continue to collect,” Art Basel CEO Noah Horowitz said during a press conference. “At the same time, we recognize that the art market is undergoing a period of recalibration. … There is clearly a degree of caution in the market these days. However, I will say, given the energy in the halls today, that the art market is very much still here, and very strong.”

The fair’s opening teemed with people, and big sales seemed to follow. An untitled work by Ashile Gorky from 1946–47 sold for $16 million at Hauser & Wirth’s booth. Meanwhile, a Yayoi Kusama sculpture presented by David Zwirner in the Unlimited sector sold for $5 million.  

Museum directors and collectors, such as Charles Carmignac, Emma Lavigne, and Fabrice Hergott, were spotted walking by a new version of Agnes Denes’s Wheatfield – A Confrontation (1984). First shown in New York’s Financial District, the work reappeared at the fair as a long rectangular patch of wheat stems. Fairgoers could walk through a path cut into Denes’s Wheatfield, making it a hit early on.

Below, a look at the best art on offer at the 2024 edition of Art Basel Basel, which runs until June 16.

The 172,000-square-foot hall reserved for Unlimited is currently home to 76 projects and live performances by Seba Calfuqueo, Resto Pulfer, and Anna Uddenberg and others. Giovanni Carmine, director of the Kunst Halle Sankt Gallen in Switzerland, has curated this edition of Unlimited, which, for the first time ever, will also feature a People’s Pick award, selected by visitors themselves. A winner will be announced by the end of the week after the votes are tallied.

There is no shortage of old works that have returned to view here: Wu Tien-Chang’s Farewell, Spring and Autumn, which appeared in the Taiwanese Pavilion at the 2015 Venice Biennale; Christo’s 2014 recreation of his 1963 wrapped Volkswagen; a 153-foot-long Keith Haring frieze from 1984; a reactivation of Carl Andre’s 1988 Körners Repose, consisting 50 floor units. But fear not, there are new works here, too.

Below, a look at some of the best and most impressive works on view in Art Basel’s Unlimited section.

The 150-year anniversary of this artistic movement is being celebrated across Europe and America. The fifth edition of the Normandie Impressionniste festival will mark the sesquicentennial with, fittingly, 150 events in Rouen, Caen, and other locations in Normandy over a span of six months. And the Musée d’Orsay, which has one of the best (if not the best) collections of Impressionist art in the world, has loaned about 180 works to 30 institutions for the occasion and mounted its own highly anticipated show, which debuted in late March. Here we highlight that show and 18 other must-see Impressionist exhibitions.

Across these presentations, it was evident that Venet is more than just the sculptor of the giant steel scultpures for which he is today best known. These sculptures have been shown in venues from Paris’s Centre Pompidou to Seoul’s Leeum Museum of Art, but despite his international prominence, full Venet retrospectives have been rare—especially in France, where he has yet to have a full-dress show on the scale that he has in other countries.

This week, in Venice, in a show held in to coincide with the opening of the Biennale, Venet will exhibit objects related to some of his earliest conceptual artworks, from the early 1960s, he recently inked a representation deal with the Bigaignon gallery, which will specifically show his photography, a lesser-seen part of his work. Meanwhile, the Paris 2024 committee, the group that facilitates art commissions tied to the Olympics, has commissioned Venet to create a work to make one of his steel arcs for a site in a park near the Stade de France and Saint Denis’s Olympic Aquatic Center, the only building that has been constructed specially for the games this summer.

As an artist who’s worked in many different mediums, Venet said in an interview that he defies labels. “My work is not about immediate seduction,” he explained. “It’s a language that needs to be learnt. One must understand the logic of an artwork in order to fully appreciate it. I am always looking for the right equation, solution, which convinces rather than persuades.

“Why limit oneself to one idea, when there is so much to be created?” the 82-year-old artist continued. “Sure, there is a constant in my exploring the line, but I try to take it to different places.”

Born in the south of France in 1941, Venet initially showed a taste for drawing and painting, not sculpture. At age 11, he chanced upon a book on Pierre-Auguste Renoir. As he was turning the pages, it hit him: art would be his reason to live.

He moved toward sculpture in 1961 while he was serving in the military. “In the 1960s, abstract art was over,” Venet recalled. “Pop art and New Realism and Narrative Figuration prevailed. No one wanted my tar paintings or my Pile of Coal,” a famed 1963 sculpture that is exactly what its title says.

That year was the one Venet began to forge an artistic connection that would help sustain his career. Through the artist Ben, Venet met the sculptor Arman in 1963. Venet sold a work that Arman the latter had gifted him, to pay for his first plane ticket to New York City, where he was introduced to Minimalist art. Arman continued to support him, giving him one dollar every day to buy some food and water, until he forgot all about Venet for an entire weekend. The artist remembers that weekend fondly.

It was around this time that Venet changed his first name from Bernard to Bernar. “It seems more ink has been spilled over the matter than over my art,” he said, laughing. “To be honest, I am not sure why I did it anymore. Bernard is hybrid. Bernar without the final letter sounded stronger, more impactful, somehow more ‘black.’… It is closer to my tar-coated pieces,” which were originally done on cardboard or paper.

In his 20s, Venet positioned himself against Abstract Expressionism and lyrical abstraction, which at the time were the most critically acclaimed—and the most financially viable—artistic tendencies. “The market did not care about me, which allowed me to go further and further in my investigations,” he said. To this day, he considers his most radical piece Représentation graphique de la fonction y=x²/4 (1966), This painting, which depicts an algebraic function, was acquired by the Centre Pompidou in 2006. “You can tell that the line will become the essential component of my work,” he said. “The equation paves the way for my mathematical paintings.”

Although much of Venet’s output since then has been sculpture, Venet said he had never abandoned painting: “I must insist on one thing: I am not a painter more than I am a sculptor, a performer more than I am a photographer. This is very important.” Instead, he simply considers himself an artist, relying upon whichever medium best suits his conceptual concerns.

“When I resumed to painting, in 1976, I opted for simple geometrical figures, leaving my canvases in the field of self-referentiality, of monosemy (as opposed to the concepts of pansemy and polysemy, respectively associated to his abstract and figurative creations). With those new canvases, I embraced aesthetic considerations that used to be excluded from my conceptual works. I then began to pay attention to the off-white quality of a background, to choose more carefully the greys I should use to paint this or that line.”

After some 50 years in the States, Venet returned to France. Eight years ago, he created the Venet Foundation, in Le Muy, next to Nice. He often describes it as a work of total art.

“I started with nothing,” he said. “I wanted to give back to society, to whom I owe everything I have possess. My children have perfectly understood, when explained it to them.”

This nearly 20-acre estate is home to about 100 works by people ranging from Fluxus artist Ben to the late sculptor Arman. Yet his holdings are not just limited to Frenchmen: he also owns art by American Minimalists like Donald Judd and Sol LeWitt, as well as British sculptures like Anish Kapoor and Anthony Caro. Those works are accessible to the public. Venet is also building a private collection that includes drawings by Matisse and Picasso.

The grand size of Venet’s foundation is in some ways mirrored by the scale of his sculptures. In 2019, he unveiled Arc Majeur, a 250-ton steel arc surrounding a Belgian highway that holds the record for the biggest artwork in Europe. He had the idea for it in 1985, and it took 30 years to make this project happen. Last summer, after joining Perrotin’s roster, he presented two giant stack of monumental arcs in the middle of Paris’s emblematic Place Vendôme. But he is not done yet.

He teased two projects. This summer, a 3D avatar of Venet will welcome the visitors to the artist’s foundation in Le Muy. He was interviewed last year covered with sensors meant to capture all his coming and goings, and any of his movements. “Not only will this avatar have my voice, but it will also borrow my attitude,” he said. “It has a pedagogical purpose.”

The second project Venet is very excited about is planned to mark the 200th anniversary of Nice’s 1860 annexation to France. It’s a mysterious work set to be produced and unveiled in 2058, long after Venet is dead—if it is ever realized at all. No one knows what it will look like. “It will be up to the municipality to fund its fabrication,” he said with a hint of mischief. “Or not. Who knows if I will be remembered by then.”

Titled “A Mountain not to climb on. For Monet,” Laib’s exhibition at the Musée de l’Orangerie consists of two impressive installations that bring Impressionism, which is celebrating its 150th anniversary this year, into the 21st century. On the lower level, more than a hundred piles of rice take up the entirety of a small, single room located opposite the permanent artworks and a temporary exhibition gallery currently devoted to Robert Ryman (through July 1). Laib, who represented Germany at the Venice Biennale in 1982, started using rice and wax in 1983, and has kept to the medium, 40 years on, for the sake of consistency. “In the past 50 years, I have experimented new techniques, of course, but not every five minutes. Had Piet Mondrian shifted his practice every other month, no one would look at his art the way they do now,” Laib told ARTnews in a recent interview.

On the first level, past the entrance hall, in an all-white antechamber that leads to Monet’s Water Lilies, a four-inch pyramidal pile of a yellow powdery material sits on a display pedestal. Laib said that Claire Bernardi, the museum’s director, “wanted a pollen piece in connection with Claude Monet. This type of work requires a quiet space.” The pollen on view here is sourced from hazelnut trees, the same kind as the large-scale floor installation he made in 2013 at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. “It is a bit sticky, which allows me to shape it as a mountain. Pollen from pine trees, for instance, is thinner. It would collapse and flow like lava from a volcano,” he added.

Laib has always worked with natural materials in his art-making. It all started with stone. In 1972, he carved his first Brahmanda, an ongoing series of egg-shaped stone sculptures that elegantly rest in the middle of nearly empty rooms. That pursuit led him to study medicine, not to pursue a career as a doctor, but to further his art. A few years later, Laib rose to fame with his Milkstones, slabs of pure white marble sanded down to contain milk.

In 1977, Laib, then an up-and-coming sculptor, began to collect pollen, which he refers to as “the beginning of life,” around his home in Germany. “It fits the way he has been living his whole life”, his wife Carolyn Reep explained during our interview. “The glass house, that his father built near the town of Biberach, stands in the middle of a meadow. He has always been connected to nature.” (The house was inspired by Mahatma Gandhi’s original house at Sabarmati Ashram, in Ahmedabad, India.)

As for rice, “it is food but visually it has a very abstract presence, which I really like,” Laib said. In the context of the Musée de l’Orangerie, some may see rice grains as a physical variation on Pointillism, a branch of Impressionism.

Laib’s relationship to Impressionism and Claude Monet specifically dates back to his teenage years, when his parents took him for the first time around Europe. He remembers seeing a major work by the Impressionist, though all these years later he can’t recall exactly which one. For Laib, it was more the impression the work left on him. Back then, his family had only eyes for Kazimir Malevich and worshipped Constantin Brancusi almost like “a demigod,” he said.

Laib continued, “Making a mountain of pollen in this ocean of waterlilies almost feels like meeting Claude Monet in person. I had the same sensation, the same timeless experience with Fra Angelico in Florence [in 2019].”

There are certainly similarities between the two artists, working decades apart. Like Monet, Laib lives close to nature, to the earth, and enjoys studying plants. Monet’s depictions of poppy fields, urban monuments like Paris’s Gare Saint-Lazare or the Rouen Cathedral, or his personal garden in Giverny are often thought to border on abstraction. And in a way, Laib’s non-figurative works can also be thought of as landscapes. “To me, the visual presence of those rice and pollen mountains is simply beautiful,” he said.

Both artists have also been influenced by Asian art and culture. Monet collected over 200 Japanese prints during his lifetime and constructed a Japanese bridge built in his garden in Giverny, which was also the subject of his final body of work. Laib’s parents were friends with German landscaper Jakob Bräckle, who introduced them to Taoism and Zen Buddhism and ultimately led them to collect Tantric drawings, which reminded them of Mondrian’s aesthetic.

The day of his performance at the Musée de l’Orangerie was the day when Laib was returning to Europe from India, where he has maintained a studio since 2006. He usually spends a couple of months there once or twice a year to work on new projects. “Life in India is not easy. It’s like living on another planet. You learn so much about yourself. It opens your mind to something different,” Laib said.  

His Indian studio and home are nothing like the minimalist glass house his father had built in 1960s Germany, though Laib still enjoys visiting it, especially in the spring—the best time to begin harvesting pollen. Before landing in Paris, Laib was working on a new series of Brahmandas in black granite. With his response to Monet’s Water Lilies now behind him, Laib admitted that his absolute dream in the future would be to perform a mountain of pollen on a Brancusi table.