Daniel H. Weiss, the former president and CEO of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, will be the new director of the Philadelphia Art Museum. His appointment follows the sudden firing of former director Sasha Suda – who has since sued the museum for dismissing her ‘without a valid basis’ – earlier this month. Weiss, a scholar in medieval and Byzantine art, was president of Haverford College from 2013 to 2015 before being appointed president of the Met. After the departure of Thomas P. Campbell as director in 2017, Weiss became joint CEO and president. In 2023, Weiss – who has for the past two years been a professor at Johns Hopkins University – has written about the purpose of the modern museum in Why the Museum Matters, (Yale University Press). He is expected to begin his new role on 1 December.
A portrait by Gustav Klimt sold for $236.4m at Sotheby’s New York on 18 November, making it the most expensive work of modern art ever sold at auction. Portrait of Elisabeth Lederer, which was painted by Klimt in 1914–16, depicts the daughter of Klimt’s most significant patrons, the Austrian industrialist August Lederer and his wife Serena. Though Nazis looted the painting in 1938, it was returned ten years later to Lederer’s brother, Erich, who sold it in 1983, the Guardian reports. Since 1985, it has been owned by Estée Lauder heir Leonard A. Lauder, whose collection of 20th-century art was auctioned by Sotheby’s after his death in June. The painting had been expected to sell for $150m.
The Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C., has deaccessioned works by Arthur Dove, Georgia O’Keeffe and Georges Seurat to raise funds for future acquisitions and the care of the permanent collection, the Washington Post reports. The works, which were acquired by the museum’s founders Duncan and Marjorie Phillips, were sold at Sotheby’s New York on 20 November for a total of $13.4m against a high estimate of $14.8m (totals include fees, estimates do not). More works, including a painting by Picasso, will be auctioned in upcoming sales. The decision to sell works from the collection has been criticised since it was proposed 18 months ago. Eliza Rathbone, chief curator emerita at the Phillips, said she was ‘appalled’ that the museum would ‘so irreparably mar the vision of the founder’, while Liza Phillips, a granddaughter of the museum’s founders, called the sales ‘a shame’ and something the family ‘never imagined’. While the planned sales will go ahead, future sales of works from the museum’s collection have been restricted under a new agreement.
The Musée du Louvre closed one of its galleries indefinitely on 17 November after an audit revealed structural weaknesses in the building, Le Monde reports. The Campana Gallery, which comprises nine rooms of ancient Greek ceramics, will remain closed while further investigation is conducted into some of the beams that support the floor above the gallery. Concerns about the structural soundness of the building – which was forced to close for three days after thieves exploited security failures to steal eight precious items on 19 October – have been ongoing for months. In January Laurence des Cars, director of the museum, wrote to the French culture minister Rachida Dati that parts of the museum were reaching ‘a worrying level of obsolescence’. Plans for a 10-year redevelopment of the museum are ongoing.
The British Museum has ended a sponsorship deal with Japan Tobacco International (JTI) after 15 years, the Guardian reports. The deal, which ended in September and has not been renewed, provided the museum with funds that supported a curatorial position and an acquisition fund for Japanese art. Campaigners have been calling for its termination for a decade: in 2016, some 1,000 experts signed an open letter to institutions including the British Museum and the Royal Academy – which is still sponsored by JTI – that described the deal as ‘morally unacceptable’. On 11 November, the same day the Tobacco Control Research Group published a report that described the deal as a key part of JTI’s lobbying strategy, the museum removed JTI’s name from its website.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art has announced that its new 1,070 square-metre galleries will be named the Condé M. Nast Galleries after the founder of the media company. Plans for the galleries, which replace a gift shop near the museum’s Great Hall, were first shared in 2023. The space is intended to become a dedicated home for the museum’s annual Costume Institute exhibitions. The name of the gallery recognises the ‘lead gift’ of Condé Nast for the project, the fundraising for which was led by former Vogue editor-in-chief Anna Wintour. The gallery’s inaugural exhibition, ‘Costume Art’, which will also be the theme of next year’s Met Gala, will open in May 2026. In other Met-related news, the Art Newspaper reports that workers from the museum are in the process of unionising. A chapter of the labour union United Auto Workers (UAW) has petitioned the National Labor Relations Board to approve a unit that would represent some 1,000 full- and part-time employees. The workers’ reasons for unionisation, said a statement from UAW, include ‘long term pay inequities, lack of job protection and ever-increasing workloads’.
After 50 years, Sperone Westwater gallery in New York will close at the end of this year, Artnet reports. Founded in 1975 by Angela Westwater, Gian Enzo Sperone and Konrad Fischer – who left the business in 1982 – the gallery represents artists including Richard Long, Bruce Nauman and Francesco Clemente. Speculation about its future arose in August after Sperone filed a lawsuit against Westwater in New York’s supreme court, alleging ‘unlawful handling’ of gallery funds. The closure is the latest in a spate of gallery shutterings in New York: Kasmin, Clearing and Venus over Manhattan also closed this year.