The Year in Review

Saudia Arabia and Sally Mann

The start of the year saw Saudi Arabia unveil plans by US Light and Space artist James Turrell for a vast outdoor installation connected by a series of tunnels and staircases in the Al Ula desert.

It would not be the last time the Gulf states flexed their cultural muscles in 2025.

January was also the month Texas police seized a series of Sally Mann photographs from an exhibition at the Modern Art Museum in Fort Worth. The pictures, nudes taken of her own young children, were eventually returned in April.

Riggio downsizes and LA Frieze

There is downsizing and then there is downsizing Louise Riggio-style.

The widow of Barnes & Noble bookshops founder Leonard Riggio announced in February she was thinning out her collection and would "not put them in storage".

Instead 30 works including pieces by Magritte, Picasso, Giacometti and Warhol went to Christie's in New York for auction where the sale made $271.9 million with the top lot being a Mondrian that made $47.56million making it an early sign of the power of block buster single-owner sales.

On the West Coast, Frieze returned to Los Angeles with the city still reeling from the devastating wild fires in the weeks before. Their repercussions reached as far as London where Paul McCarthy put on hold his Hauser & Wirth show after a family home, artworks and archive were all left as ashes.

Lisa Schiff and sales slump

Art adviser to the stars Lisa Schiff was sentenced to two and a half years in prison after admitting defrauding clients to the tune of at least $6.4 million.

A New York court heard from one anonymous victim who said Schiff showed no sign of understanding "the impact of her actions on the people she stole from".

Meanwhile, the slump in the art market continued in March as the combined takings from Sotheby's and Christie's Hong Kong modern and contemporary evening sales came in under HK$1 billion ($128 million) for the first time since 2018 despite Jean-Michel Basquiat’s Sabado por la Noche making $12.2 million.

RIP Elaine Wynn and the Frick re-opens

Tributes were paid to Las Vegas businesswoman Elaine Wynn who died on April 14 aged 82. It later emerged she left her $142 million Francis Bacon triptych of Lucian Freud to LACMA while the bulk of her collection went under the hammer in November.

A few days later in April, New York's Frick Collection re-opened after a five-year, $220 million renovation of its Upper East Side home.

It marked a changing of the guard as longtime director Ian Wardropper retired to be replaced by Axel Ruger who previously ran London's Royal Academy of Arts.

National Gallery revamp and Doha here we come

The director of London's National Gallery, Gabriele Finaldi, appeared to achieve the impossible and united the country's critics in agreement as they all praised the $113 million, two-year revamp of its Sainsbury Wing and rehang of more than 1,000 paintings including work by Titian, Rembrandt and Monet.

Remarkably it was not even the gallery's most ambitious move of the year, but more of that later.

Meanwhile in May, the onward march of Art Basel continued as its four fairs would soon be five after it announced a new edition in Doha for February 2026.

Going Labubu in Basel and Kim Sajet resigned to her fate

Fresh from announcing its move into the Gulf, Art Basel returned to Switzerland with the usual mix of strong sales and art-world celebrities.

Slightly more unusual was the big hit of the fair - a limited edition Labubu figurine created in collaboration with Hong Kong–born artist Kasing Lung. All 100 copies of the toy flew off the shelves despite the $245 price tag with reports of them surfacing on re-sale sites almost immediately for around $1,700.

June also saw Kim Sajet resign as director of the US National Portrait Gallery weeks after President Trump said he wanted to fire her and criticized her as a "a strong supporter of DEI”. It was not the last White House attack on the Smithsonian - of which the gallery is a part - in 2025.

Amy says no show and Phillips seeks early birds

July saw more trouble for the Smithsonian as Amy Sherald withdrew her American Sublime show at the National Portrait Gallery over fears of censorship.

The painter would reportedly have been the first contemporary Black artist to have an exhibition at the Washington D.C. gallery but canceled after she said she was told her painting of a transgender Statue of Liberty might be removed over fears of offending Donald Trump. Instead her touring retrospective went to the Baltimore Museum of Art.

In a bid to revive an ailing market Phillips decided to think outside the box and offer lower fees for early bidders in the hope it would encourage sales.

A New York tragedy and a man in the bean?

Matthew Christopher Pietras' name was already immortalized when New York's Frick Collection named the post of Head of Music and Performance after him - by August it was generating headlines for tragic reasons.

The 40-year-old was found dead on May 30 - just a day after the city's Metropolitan Opera was told the $10 million he had just donated was not his to give. It returned the money while the Frick said it did not "believe that any of the contributions were made with misappropriated funds". Exactly where his money came from is still unclear.

It was not the first demonstration in Chicago and will not be last but one of the strangest took place in August when protesters gathered in the city's Millennium Park to stake out Anish Kapoor's Cloud Gate sculpture insisting a man was trapped inside the landmark known to locals as The Bean.

Project Domani and VVIP's in Paris

Happy days at London's National Gallery which announced it was building a new wing and already had funding to the tune of $508.9 million with the Julia Rausing Trust and the charitable foundation of Michael Moritz and his wife, Harriet Heyman, both committing $203 million - the largest publicly reported single-cash donations to a museum or gallery anywhere in the world.

September was less happy for the Tate when it learned the new wing - codenamed Project Domani - was going to be used to house post-1900 work, something the National Gallery previously left to the younger institution in a gentleman's agreement.

Louvre loss and SFMOMA calls on RM

It could take you longer to read this newsletter than the seven minutes it took a gang of thieves to escape with $102 million of jewels from the Louvre in broad daylight on October 19.

Arrests have been made, charges have been brought but the jewels are still unaccounted for and the Paris institution's creaking security system brought the eyes of the world onto the failing infrastructure that supports the world's most popular museum. Its embattled leader, Laurence des Cars, faced awkward questions as did her predecessor over the institution's priorities.

The rise of South Korean culture generally and hit show KPop Demon Hunters specifically helped power a boom in the nation's museums with a record 6 million people visiting the National Museum in Seoul. Not to be outdone San Francisco's Museum of Modern Art announced it too was riding this particular wave and signed up K-pop superstar RM to curate his first exhibition - including works from his collection - in 2026.

Over the channel, Art Basel Paris went one better than its rivals and introduced the concept of VVIPs - the very, very important people who were allowed into the fair four hours ahead of run-of-the-mill VIPs.

Klimt costs millions, politeness costs nothing

Was November the month the art market came back to life? It is too early to say but the New York sales certainly scored some successes.

It took six bidders just 20 minutes to make history when Gustav Klimt's Portrait of Elizabeth Lederer from the collection of cosmetics heir Leonard Lauder sold for $236.4 million - a record for a work of modern art. Other big hits included Frida Kahlo’s El sueño (La cama) which made $54.7 million though Maurizio Cattelan’s gold toilet, America, failed to flush out many bidders and only made $12.1 million.

At the other end of the scale came a unique tour of Dusseldorf's Kunstpalast museum where for a mere $8 you can be taken round for a "highly unpleasant" tour of the collection by a grumpy guide created by Carl Brandi who tells off tourists and mocks visitors' ignorance of art history.

Turner Prize history and goodbye Frank Gehry

After decades making headlines the Turner Prize made history in December when it was won by 59-year-old Nnena Kalu, who is autistic and has limited verbal communication.

She was the first artist with a learning disability to win the UK's most important contemporary art prize when the judges chose her over Rene Matic, Mohammed Sami and Zadie Xa.

Frank Gehry's death at 96 means he did not live to see the opening of the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi that he designed and which is reported to open next year on Saadiyat Island. But the architect already had one - transformational - Guggenheim building to his credit with the success of his design for the Bilbao art museum helping transform the industrial city in Spain's Basque Country into a cultural destination. It is on course in early 2026 to welcome its 29 millionth visitor since the titanium-clad landmark opened in 1997.