The Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam has reached a settlement with the Dutch government to ‘secure’ its future and avoid closure, the museum announced on 8 October. In August 2025 the museum said it may be forced to close if the government did not raise its annual subsidy by €2.5m to fund major renovations, with director Emilie Gordenker saying that the building was close to becoming ‘dangerous’ for the collection and visitors. The museum later filed a legal complaint, arguing that the government was breaching the agreement it signed in 1962 with the Vincent van Gogh Foundation, which has now been settled out of court for an undisclosed amount. The museum’s statement said that renovations would begin in autumn 2028, with Gordenker adding that the museum was ‘relieved and grateful to be able to move forward with this important project’.
Two paintings by Pierre-Auguste Renoir stolen from the Renoir Museum in Cagnes-sur-Mer last month have been recovered, the Art Newspaper reports. Jeune femme au puits (1886) and Madame Colonna Romano (1910), together valued at €9m, were taken from the artist’s former home in the French Riviera on 8 September; their return, said Cagnes-sur-Mer mayor Bryan Masson, is a ‘tremendous relief’. Six suspects have been arrested in connection with the theft. In another French heist, a bronze book jacket by Salvador Dalí was stolen from the C. Karoutzos Contemporary Art Centre, a private museum in Issoire, last weekend, the Art Newspaper reports. Weighing 150kg and encrusted in precious stones, pearls and seashells, the cover was made by Dalí between 1958 and 1961 and is valued at several million euros. Its theft was discovered on the morning of 5 October by the museum’s founder, Christian Karoutzos, who said that the thieves had ‘assassinated French heritage’. Also over the weekend, a robber attempted to break into the Musée Nissim de Camondo in Paris. ARTnews reports that a thief broke a window to gain entry to the museum but was scared off by its security system. The museum, which is currently being renovated, is scheduled to reopen in 2030.
Protesters have put up a display outside the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York to illustrate the links between Leon Black, trustee at the museum, and Jeffrey Epstein. Black, who became chair of the museum board in 2018, stepped down amid calls for his removal in 2021, but has remained a trustee. During the protest, which according to Hyperallergic was attended by some two dozen people, the Institute of Primary Facts parked its ‘Bookmobile’ – a converted food truck containing bound volumes of the released Epstein files, in which Black is mentioned thousands of times – outside the museum.
Souraya Noujaim is the new director of the Louvre Abu Dhabi. Noujaim was the museum’s first scientific, curatorial and collections management director from 2018–23 before becoming head of Islamic arts at the Louvre in Paris. She takes over from founding director Manuel Rabaté, who resigned in February to become director of the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art in New Delhi. In other appointments, Jane Ellis has been named deputy director and chief operating officer of the Victoria and Albert Museum. Ellis, who has been director of finance and resources at the museum since 2019 and begins her new role next month, takes up the post at a difficult time for the museum, which has faced strikes by workers over pay and working conditions.
