Macron to make announcement after leaks about Louvre’s dilapidated state

The French president, Emmanuel Macron, is set to visit the Louvre and announce a ‘great presidential project’ regarding the museum on Tuesday. The move, reported in the French press, comes after a leaked letter by the Louvre’s president Laurence des Cars to the minister of culture, Rachida Dati, which outlined the dilapidation of the buildings and climatic conditions that endanger artworks, and described the visitor experience as a ‘physical ordeal’. The Louvre had 8.7m visitors last year, a decrease on pre-pandemic numbers, but still more than double the number it is supposed to welcome. The capping of daily visitor numbers at 30,000 has eased a little of the congestion, but loses the museum €15m a year (a figure not made up by the increase in the entrance fee at the beginning of 2024). Le Monde, which reports a literal leak in the Grande Galerie as recently as 22 January, estimates the cost of repairs at €450m and that of a new eastern entrance – also requested in Des Cars’ letter – at €300m. The Louvre had 8.7m visitors last year, a decrease on pre-pandemic numbers, but still more than double the number it is supposed to welcome. The capping of daily visitor numbers at 30,000 has eased a little of the congestion, but loses the museum €15m a year (a figure not made up by the increase in the entrance fee at the beginning of 2024). An unnamed member of the presidential team told AFP: ‘The Louvre is a symbol of France, it’s a source of French pride. It would be wrong to remain deaf and blind to the risks weighing on the museum today.’

The founder of the art market website Artnet, Hans Neuendorf, is retiring at the age of 88, the Art Newspaper reported earlier this week. Neuendorf’s departure is expected to result in a major restructuring of the company Artnet AG, which owns Artnet: at the annual general meeting on 27 February, shareholders will be asked to approve a new five-person supervisory board that includes Rüdiger Weng of Weng Fine Art, who, with a 29 per cent holding, is the biggest shareholder in Artnet AG. The other proposed members are Frédéric Jousset, founder of the cultural investment film ArtNova; Sophie Neuendorf, vice-president of Artnet and the daughter of Hans; and the financiers Lawrence B. Benenson and Roy Israel. On 23 January, Weng Fine Art issued a statement praising Neuendorf’s achievement’s at Artnet, but disagreeing with the new arrangements, saying that ‘a supervisory board with five members would be oversized’ and proposing that Benenson and Israel should instead be nominated for election to an advisory board. This follows a statement of November 2024 in which Rüdiger Weng condemned the repeated postponement of the AGM and the Neuendorf family’s management of the company. Founded in 1989 as an online database for auction results, Artnet now employs around 131 people and has a market capitalisation of €38m.

The painter Jo Baer has died at the age of 95. Born in Seattle in 1929, Baer studied biology and for a graduate degree in psychology before pursuing a career as an artist. In 1960, she moved from Los Angeles to New York where her abstract paintings became more hard-edge: stark white canvases lined with a thick black border. Her work was exhibited alongside artists such as Donald Judd, Dan Flavin and Sol Lewitt in shows such as ‘Systemic Painting’ at the Guggenheim Museum in 1966; it was included in Documenta in 1968 and, in 1975, she had a retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art. That was also the year she moved to Europe, after which Baer’s style underwent a dramatic shift as she turned to what she called ‘radical figuration’. Baer’s work can be found in the permanent collections of the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., MoMA and the Tate, among other museums. Her most recent solo show was the Irish Museum of Modern Art in 2023 and her writings are collected in Broadsides and Belles-Lettres: Selected Writings and Interviews 1965–2010. Baer’s death on 21 January in Amsterdam, where she had lived since the early 1980s, was announced by Pace Gallery, which had represented her since 2019.

Two insurance companies have asked a Florida court to block a $19.7m claim made by owners of the 25 fake Basquiats seized by the FBI from the Orlando Museum of Art in 2022, reports the Art Newspaper. The paintings, which were on loan at the museum when they were seized, were owned by three individuals collectively known as the Basquiat Venice Collection Group (BVCG). When the works were loaned, OMA added the BVCG as an additional party to its own insurance policy. In papers filed in December and since seen by Associated Press, Liberty Mutual Insurance Company and Great American Insurance Company argued that the three members of the BVCG are not entitled to compensation as forgeries are not covered by the policy and because the works have not been damaged or destroyed. As the dispute continues, the death of Aaron De Groft, director of the Orlando Museum at the time of the seizure, was announced on 18 January. He was 59. The museum fired De Groft in June 2022, later suing him for fraud and breach of contract. De Groft continued to insist that the works were authentic: ‘I did my due diligence,’ he told the New York Times in 2023. Prior to his role at the Orlando Museum, De Groft’s previous roles included being deputy director of the Ringling Museum in Sarasota and director of the Muscarelle Museum of Art at William and Mary College in Virginia. The FBI investigation into the fake Basquiats continues.