Christine Macel steps down as director of the Musée des Arts Décoratifs

Christine Macel has stepped down as director of the Musée des Arts Décoratifs in Paris. Having taken up the role two years ago, she told the Art Newspaper earlier this week that she was taking a role advising the museum’s chairman, Johannes Huth – a newly created post – until her contract ends in October 2025. She said that it was a ‘relief’ to be leaving her post, ‘as the situation had become untenable in what an audit has described as a ‘crisis of governance and organisation’. The museum had commissioned an external audit after a medical expert warned about staff mental health amid several complaints and departures. Macel stepped down two days after the report was published. Before joining the Musée des Arts Décoratifs, Macel worked at the Centre Pompidou for more than 20 years, and curated the 2017 Venice Biennale. Her background in contemporary art made her an unusual choice for the directorship in the eyes of some commentators. Bénédicte Gady, who has been chief curator of graphic arts at the museum for six years, will be interim director for the next nine months.

The National Gallery in London has banned visitors from bringing liquids into the building, reports the BBC. Effective from Friday 18 October, the ban comes after a series of protest actions by Just Stop Oil – five since July 2022 – at the museum. Last week, the UK’s leading museum directors wrote an open letter calling for attacks on artworks to stop. In response, Just Stop Oil and Youth Demand – two of whose supporters targeted Picasso’s Motherhood at the National Gallery last week – published an open letter asking for a meeting with management. Baby formula, expressed milk and prescription medicines are exempt from the ban.

The art advisor Lisa Schiff has pleaded guilty to stealing $6.5m from her clients. The US Department of Justice found that between 2018 and 2023 Schiff defrauded at least 12 clients, an artist, an artist’s estate and a gallery ‘to fund a lavish lifestyle’; the transactions in question involve some 55 artworks. Through her art advisory company, SFA Advisory, Schiff is alleged to have diverted the funds of clients to pay personal and business expenses, and did not disclose sales to clients when she sold work on their behalf, the Art Newspaper reports. ‘Lisa Schiff attempted to paint a picture of a successful fine-art advisory business, when in reality – as she admitted today – it was actually a multimillion-dollar fraudulent scheme,’ James E. Dennehy of the FBI said in a statement. Schiff shut down SFA Advisory in May 2023 and declared bankruptcy in January. She will be sentenced in January 2025. The maximum sentence for wire fraud is 20 years.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art has returned a looted 5th-century Greek cup to Italian ownership. Earlier this week the New York Times reported that the drinking cup (kylix), was one of two vessels that arrived at the museum in fragments over a period of 15 years, beginning in 1978. In 2022, investigators at the Manhattan District Attorney’s office claimed that one of the vessels had been looted and deliberately broken up before being gifted and sold to the Met by a group of people associated with the trafficking of looted antiquities. The Manhattan DA’s office seized the kylix and repatriated it to Italy later that year. It has now emerged that in December 2023, the Met transferred the title of ownership of the other kylix to Italy, though the Italian authorities have agreed that the museum can continue to display it. Ann Bailis, a spokesperson for the Met, said that the DA’s office had ‘provided the Met with new information that made it clear the work should be returned’.

Darren Walker, currently president of the Ford Foundation, will be the next president of the National Gallery of Art (NGA) in Washington, D.C. In July, Walker announced that he would be stepping down as president of the Ford Foundation in December 2025; during his 11-year tenure to date he has overseen $7bn in grants. He has served on the board of the NGA for five years, during which time he established an acquisitions programme funded by the Ford Foundation. Walker will replace Mitchell Rales, who has been president since 2019 and will remain on the board.