Maria Balshaw has announced that she is stepping down as director of the Tate museums in spring 2026. She took over in June 2017 after being joint director of the Whitworth and the Manchester Art Gallery. During her time at the Whitworth she oversaw a widely acclaimed £15m refurbishment, and the institution won the Art Fund’s Museum of the Year award in 2015. Balshaw began her career as a lecturer at the University of Northampton in 1994, moving to the University of Birmingham before she joined the newly launched government Creative Partnerships programme in 2002 and became one of the first Clore Leadership fellows in 2004. Her time at the Tate has been marked by steering the institution through the pandemic, the establishment of an £50m endowment fund for Tate Modern and the refurbishment of Tate Liverpool. But during her tenure visitor figures have plummeted, with a drop of 2.2m visitors to Tate Modern and Tate Britain since the pandemic, according to visitor figures released in March 2025, and an exhibition programme that its critics regard as focused on social justice to the detriment of the art. The Tate’s financial struggles have led it to propose a seven per cent reduction in staff, and strikes over pay started in November 2025. Balshaw said, ‘I feel now is the right time to pass on the baton to a next Director who will take the organisation into its next decade of innovation and artistic leadership.’ Roland Rudd, chair of the Tate, described Balshaw as ‘a trailblazer […]. She has never wavered from her core belief – that more people deserve to experience the full richness of art, and more artists deserve to be part of that story.’ Balshaw will end her directorship by co-curating a Tracey Emin exhibition, which opens in February 2026.
Four men stole more than 600 artefacts from the Bristol Museum on 25 September, the Avon and Somerset police report. The items, which include carved ivory, bronze and silver figurines, jewellery and military memorabilia, belong to the museum’s Empire and Commonwealth collection. ‘The theft of many items which carry a significant cultural value is a significant loss for the city,’ police officer Dan Burgan said in a statement. ‘These items, many of which were donations, form part of a collection that provides insight into a multi-layered part of British history.’
The photographer Martin Parr, best known for capturing the British at work and more often at play, has died at the age of 73. Emerging in the early 1970s with black-and-white work made in the north-west of England, Parr made his name with the groundbreaking book The Last Resort (1986), which was shot in New Brighton on Merseyside between 1983–85. It was criticised for satirising its subjects rather than sympathising with them – an impression created in part by the use of flash and saturated colour – but Parr regarded this and all his subsequent work as belonging to the documentary tradition. When he applied to join Magnum photo agency in 1994, his membership was approved by a single vote and against the wishes of the agency’s co-founder Henri Cartier-Bresson. Views had shifted significantly by the time Parr was elected president of Magnum (2013–17). Parr was a significant collector of photo books and donated his 12,000-strong collection to the Tate in 2017. In the same year, he set up the Martin Parr Foundation in Bristol to house his archive and put on regular exhibition of other photographers. He curated an influential edition of the Rencontres des Arles in 2004 as well as the Brighton Biennial in 2010. Parr was diagnosd with cancer in 2021. Read a tribute from Phillip Prodger, who curated an exhibition of Parr’s photographs at the National Portrait Gallery in London in 2019, here.
The architect Frank Gehry has died at the age of 96. Best known for the titanium clad Guggenheim Museum Bilbao (1997), Gehry designed the homes of several high-profile cultural institutions, such as the Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles (2003) and the Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris (2014). On a much smaller scale is the building that made his name: the house Gehry designed for himself in Santa Monica in 1978 out of what he described as ‘the dumb, normal materials of the neighbourhood’. Born Frank Owen Goldberg in Toronto in 1929, the architect moved to Los Angeles in the mid 1940s and studied ceramics before turning to architecture. After working for Gruen Associates, specialists in the design of shopping malls, Gehry opened his own practice in 1962 and won the Pritzker Prize in 1989. He later chafed against the ‘star-chitect’ label. Citing his artist contemporaries who had inspired him, he once said ‘It was so free and un-self-conscious. I wanted to do that.’ Read Christopher Turner’s tribute to the architect here.
The manuscript dealer Gérard Lhéritier has been found guilty of gang fraud by a French court, the Art Newspaper reports. Through his company, Aristophil, Lhéritier set up a shared ownership scheme that allowed investors to buy into a vast collection of rare manuscripts, which included André Breton’s two Surrealist manifestos and the Marquis de Sade’s manuscript for 120 days of Sodom. The judge described the scheme, in which 18,000 people invested €850m, as a ‘Ponzi scheme’ and a ‘trap for the clients’. Lhéritier is appealing against the verdict but will be held in jail in the meantime. Lhéritier’s notary and a law professor at the Sorbonne have also been given suspended sentences.
Nnena Kalu has won the 2025 Turner Prize. The British artist, who was awarded the £25,000 prize at a ceremony in Bradford on Tuesday, is known for her swirling drawings and colourful abstract sculptures made with found materials, ropes, textiles, tape and more. Kalu, who is autistic and has limited verbal communication, is the first learning-disabled artist to win the award. In Apollo’s review of the shortlist exhibition, Robert Barry described her work as having a ‘kaleidoscopic exuberance’, her sculptures reminding him of ‘intergalactic tardigrades and glittering junk monsters’. The other shortlisted artists were Mohammed Sami, Rene Matić and Zadie Xa.
A leak at the Louvre has damaged 300–400 items in the museum’s Egyptian department, the Guardian reports. According to the Louvre’s deputy administrator, Francis Steinbock, the affected works are ‘Egyptology journals’ and ‘scientific documentation’ from the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The leak was caused by the accidental opening of a valve in the heating and ventilation system, which was due to be replaced from September 2026. They will be dried and sent to a bookbinder to be restored before returning to the shelves. In January this year, a leaked letter written by the museum’s director, Laurence des Cars, to culture minister Rachida Dati described visiting the museum as a ‘physical ordeal’ due in part to its dilapidation. The museum has announced an internal investigation into the leak.
The US Senate has voted to update the current law on Nazi-looted art. The Holocaust Expropriated Recovery (HEAR) Act was designed to make it easier for Holocaust survivors and their heirs to pursue the recovery of Nazi-looted art in US courts. Passed in 2016, it included a sunset provision that would cause it to expire on 31 December 2026. The updated act has no such clause and aims ‘to ensure that claims are considered on their merits’ rather than taking the passing of time into account. It would, however, retain the 2016 Act’s six-year time limit on suing after the claimant discovers that they have a claim. The bill now passes to the House of Representatives.