The National Gallery has announced plans to raise £750m for Project Domani, the gallery’s new initiative to grow its collection of 20th- and 21st-century art and to build a new wing to house works from this period. So far, £375m of the required funds have been raised, with director Gabriele Finaldi saying that the museum ‘[looked] forward to welcoming new donors and partners to help us realise this shared ambition’. The museum has also announced the six shortlisted architectural firms in the running to design the new wing. These include Foster + Partners, whose projects include the refurbishment of the Imperial War Museum in London, and Selldorf Architects, which completed the renovation of the National Gallery’s Sainsbury Wing in May. The selected architect will be announced in April 2026.
Pace Gallery, the art dealer Emmanuel Di Donna and former head of private sales at Sotheby’s David Schrader have announced the launch of Pace Di Donna Schrader Galleries, a new mega-gallery specialising in secondary market sales. Headquartered in New York, the new gallery will commence operations in early 2026, with its flagship space set to open in the summer. It will also use Pace’s existing galleries across Los Angeles, London, Berlin, Seoul, and Tokyo. Arne Glimcher, founder of Pace, said that he was ‘excited’ about the new partnership with Di Donna and Scrader, adding that the trio sees the new gallery as a ‘venture that will transform how galleries serve consigners and collectors; bringing the growth of the secondary market to new heights’.
The Cambodian government has requested records and archival materials from the family of Emma C. Bunker, the late art historian and former board member of the Denver Art Museum who has been connected with the trafficking of looted Southeast Asian art, Art News reports. Reports about Bunker’s involvement in trafficking Cambodia artefacts first emerged in 2022, with the Denver Post reporting that she had helped Douglas Latchford, ‘a man accused of being one of the world’s most prolific art smugglers’, to ‘legitimise his looted collection’ by using the Denver Art Museum as a ‘way station’. Latchford was indicted by federal prosecutors in connection to trafficking charges in 2019, but died in 2020 before he could stand trial; Bunker died a year later. Bradley Gordon, a legal advisor to the Cambodian Ministry of Culture and Fine Arts, contacted Bunker’s son requesting the archival documents; speaking to the Denver Post, Gordon said they were ‘very eager’ to consult the materials. ‘These notebooks could be a crucial piece of our investigative work as we continue to unravel what we consider one of the largest art crimes in history’.
Alongside the Musée du Louvre’s bump in ticket fees from 14 January 2026, the Château de Versailles, Sainte-Chapelle, the Château de Chambord and the Paris Opera will also increase prices for visitors living outside the European Economic Region, Beaux Arts reports. Tickets to Versailles in peak season (1 April–30 October) will now cost these visitors €35, while visits to Saint-Chapelle will jump from €16 to €22.
Some 1,700 historic military drawings from the Royal Engineers Museum in Kent worth an estimated £500,000 have been destroyed after a van transporting the works was stolen and set alight, leaving museum staff ‘devasted’, the BBC reports. The sketches, many of which were produced during the Second World War, had travelled to a company based near Edinburgh, where they were to be digitised. Director of the museum, Rebecca Nash, said that based on information provided by the Scottish police, they believe the collection were in the van when it was destroyed on the night of 19 November, and added that the museum would be ‘extremely pleased to recover any of the items should they have escaped destruction’.