The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York, the Centre Pompidou in Paris and M+ in Hong Kong have announced an alliance that means they will treat their holdings as a single collection. At an event at M+ on 30 October, Christopher Cherix, director of MoMA, Laurent Le Bon, president of the Pompidou, and M+ director Suhanya Raffel signed an agreement for long-term loans between the three institutions, joint exhibitions and research and conservation collaborations. ‘If we succeed,’ Le Bon told Art News, ‘we will be more than the sum of our parts.’
Ministers should consider writing off the £197m loan to the British Council, say MPs on the Public Accounts Committee. In a report published on 30 October, the parliamentary committee called on the Foreign Office to convert its emergency loan to the Council during the Covid-19 pandemic to a grant. The loan charged a commercial rate of interest and servicing the debt has forced the Council – thought to generate more than £1bn in soft power activity for the UK annually – to close down offices in nine country es and cut a third of its employees. Geoffrey Clifton-Brown, who chairs the Public Accounts Committee, said that the council ‘needs the government’s help to continue its vital work, not to be simply pursued as a debtor’.
Pace gallery’s UK registered company – which oversees Pace’s operations outside the United States and Tokyo – lost more than $5.6m in 2025. In its latest statement filed at Companies House, the company’s 2025 turnover was $65.9m – a small drop from its 2024 revenue of $67.7m but well below its turnover of $104.9m in 2023. Gross profit also declined, from $20.2m to $12.8m year on year. The filing also details recent belt-tightening measures, including making staff redundant, dropping artists and cutting exhibitions. This plan was outlined earlier this year by Pace CEO Marc Glimcher, who called the current gallery model not only ‘broken, but unfixable’. These cutbacks, according to the company’s directors, mark a ‘return to the roots of Pace Gallery’ and to a ‘more efficient and profitable approach’.
The Musée du Louvre has signed a deal with unions, ending the threat of further strikes, Le Figaro and AFP report. After the theft of French crown jewels from the museum last October, employees began striking over poor working conditions, concerns over security and a planned €1bn renovation project. Since December, the strikes have forced the museum to close entirely for four days and in part for another four. The museum has pledged to hire 50 new security personnel in 2027, rising to a total of 100 more in 2008, and to increase wages for certain workers, security staff among them.
The Victoria and Albert Museum is planning significant cutbacks at the V&A Academy, the museum’s adult educational programme, reports the Art Newspaper. As well as reducing the academy’s staff by around half, the proposed changes include cutting many of its 10-week hybrid courses. Speaking anonymously to the Art Newspaper, one staffer said that ‘nobody had any inkling this was going to happen’; as per the V&A’s 2024–25 annual report, the academy had a ‘record-breaking year’ and generated sales of £1.2m, a 22 per cent increase on the previous year. The news comes as the V&A grapples with ongoing financial troubles and staff discontent: following strikes earlier this year, another walkout was planned across the museum’s four London venues for 29 and 30 October but was this week suspended after unions received an improved pay offer.
The US Pavilion at the Venice Biennale is fundraising to deinstall and to return Alma Allen’s sculptures to the United States, the New York Times reports. The US State Department provided a small amount of funding for the pavilion, but the majority was raised by American Art Conservancy, a non-profit run by the pavilion’s commissioner, Jenni Parido. In a letter shared with potential donors seen by the New York Times, Parido said that the organisation had not yet raised the $2.5m needed to cover costs, with around $1m more needed for ‘the final deinstallation and safe return of the artworks to the United States’. In a statement given to the New York Times, Allen said that he was not aware of the organisation’s financial predicament, saying that he ‘received only reimbursement for travel and my Airbnb, which was cheap’.
Rudi Fuchs, the influential Dutch curator and former director of the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam has died at the age of 84. Born in Eindhoven in 1942, Fuchs studied art history at Leiden University and became the youngest museum director in the Netherlands when he was appointed director of Eindhoven’s Van Abbemuseum at the age of 32. In 1982 Fuchs was the artistic director of Documenta 7, in which he gave a platform to artists including Keith Haring and Jean-Michel Basquiat. After leading the Castello di Rivoli near Turin and later the Gemeentemuseum Den Haag, Fuchs joined the Stedelijk as director in 1993, where he curated exhibitions and acquired works by artists including Donald Judd, Georg Baselitz and Bruce Nauman. In an Instagram post, current director Rein Wolfs called Fuchs ‘one of the most influential museum directors and curators on the international stage over the last fifty years’.
