The Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam says that it may face closure because of a funding dispute with the Dutch ministry of culture. For two years, the museum has asked for an increase of €2.5m to its annual government subsidy of €8.5m to fund major refurbishments, which are required, says its director, Emilie Gordenker, for the safety of the collection, staff and visitors. The museum has filed a legal complaint against the Dutch government, arguing that the state is in breach of the 1962 agreement made with the Vincent van Gogh Foundation. The museum holds some 200 paintings, 500 drawings and 900 letters by Van Gogh and attracts around 1.8m visitors a year. The recent resignation of culture minister Eppo Bruins has raised questions about whether an agreement can be reached. ‘We hope the new minister will take a fresh look at our situation [and] come to the conclusion that the 1962 agreement is a promise the government needs to keep,’ Gordenker told the New York Times.
After cancelling her upcoming exhibition at the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery, citing concerns about censorship, the artist Amy Sherald has condemned the Trump administration’s interference at the Smithsonian in a piece published by MSNBC on 24 August. It comes after the White House’s announcement of a complete review of the organisation and the publication last week of a list singling out specific shows and programmes to which it objects. Sherald’s warns against the government’s attempts to ‘rewrite’ history, saying that ‘when governments police museums, they are not simply policing exhibitions. They are policing imagination itself.’
A Nazi-looted painting has been discovered in a Buenos Aires property thanks to a real estate listing – but has since gone missing again, the Art Newspaper reports. Portrait of a Lady by the 18th-century painter Giuseppe Ghislandi is one of more than 1,100 works that were owned by the Jewish art dealer Jacques Goudstikker and sold by the Nazis after Goudstikker’s death in 1940. The painting, which is registered on the Lost Art Database, was last traced in 1946 to the lawyer and SS officer Friedrich Kadgien, who moved to Argentina after the Second World War. Journalists from the Dutch newspaper Algemeen Dagblad spotted it hanging on a wall in a property listed by Kadgien’s daughters. However, La Capital reports that a raid by local police revealed that the painting has since been removed. Federal prosecutors are now investigating.
Staff at the Art Gallery of New South Wales (NSW) in Sydney staged a walk out on 27 August to protest against the axeing of 51 jobs, reports the Sydney Morning Herald. The cuts were first announced on 12 August by the museum’s director, Maud Page, who said that they were necessary to save AUD$7.5m to ‘ensure the long-term future of the institution’. Staff across the gallery include senior roles such as the director of programme delivery. A period of consultation set to end on 2 September has been extended by two weeks. The walk-out – the first at the gallery in more than a decade – took place after the publication of the state budget for 2025–26 revealed the allocation of an extra AUD$10m to pay employees of the nearby Powerhouse Museum, despite the fact that two of the museum’s three campuses are currently closed. Anne Keneally, a representative of the Public Service Association union, said that ‘the Powerhouse gets AUD$1bn for a vanity rebuild’ while the Art Gallery of NSW ‘gets punished after delivering record-breaking success’.
