Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery director resigns after pressure from Trump

Kim Sajet, director of the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C., has resigned. Her position, which she had held since 2013, first came into question on 30 May, when President Trump declared that he had fired her, claiming that she was ‘a highly partisan person’. On 9 June, the Smithsonian Institution, which oversees the Gallery, issued a statement rejecting the president’s authority to make such a dismissal, Stating that ‘all personnel decisions are made by and subject to the direction of the Secretary, with oversight by the Board’. It also said that the institution’s board has asked the secretary of the Smithsonian, Lonnie Bunch III, to communicate expectations regarding the museum’s ‘nonpartisan’ standing to its directors and staff. On 13 June, Bunch sent a letter to staff that said, ‘We thank Kim for her service. She put the needs of the Institution above her own.’

On Wednesday, a French court convicted antique furniture expert Georges ‘Bill’ Pallot and furniture restorer Bruno Desnoues of creating and selling fake 18th-century furniture to clients that included the Château de Versailles, reports the Art Newspaper. The duo confessed to forging nine chairs, which they claimed were commissioned by relatives of Louis XV and Louis XVI, in 2016. Pallot received a 44-month suspended sentence and was ordered to pay a €200,000 fine, while Desnoues was handed a 32-month suspended sentence and a €100,000 fine. Both have already served four months in prison. They will also have to pay an indemnity of €1.6m to their victims. Laurent Kraemer of Kraemer Gallery in Paris, who was accused of failing to confirm the authenticity of the chairs before selling them, was acquitted of deception by gross negligence. | Meanwhile, in the UK, two men have been sentenced to prison for stealing a gold toilet by Maurizio Cattelain, worth £4.8m, from the artist’s exhibition at Blenheim Palace in 2019.

In the UK, the Department of Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) is having its budget cut by 1.4 per cent in real terms from 2025/26 to 2028/29, it announced on Wednesday. Its overall spending budget will rise from £2.4bn to £2.8bn between those years, but inflation means that this is effectively a cut. In a statement issued on Thursday, Caroline Dinenage – a Conservative MP and chair of the parliamen scrutinises the actions of DCMS – said that ‘a real-terms cut for DCMS is the wrong choice’ and that there are ‘huge unanswered questions’ about which parts of the department would ‘bear the brunt’ of the cuts.

Günther Uecker, the German artist best known for his signature ‘nail paintings’ and his membership of the avant-garde ZERO Group, has died at the age of 95. Born in Mecklenburg in 1930, Uecker grew up in a farming family, an upbringing that had a profound influence on his work, he told Apollo in an interview in 2017. In 1953, he moved first to West Berlin and two years later to Düsseldorf to study at the city’s prestigious Kunstakademie. There he became one of the leading exponents of ZERO, a collective founded by Heinz Mack and Otto Piene in 1957, whose work explored the interplay of light, motion and material. Both as an independent artist and as part of ZERO, Uecker presented work at the Stedelijk, the Guggenheim and Documenta in 1964. He represented Germany at the Venice Biennale in 1970.

From 1 January 2026, cultural institutions across France – including the Louvre, the Château de Versailles and the Opéra Garnier in Paris – will raise the admission price for non-EU visitors to €30, reports Le Monde. Other institutions are expected to follow suit in 2027, as part of a wider attempt to mitigate the effect of budget cuts, reduced corporate sponsorship and rising construction costs. Art News reports that the increased entry fee at the Louvre is expected to raise €20m per year for much-needed restoration projects outlined in January by Laurence des Cars, director of the museum, in a leaked letter.