The Guggenheim Bilbao is celebrating a record year of attendance in 2025 and the Frank Gehry-designed museum is on course to welcome its 29 millionth visitor early next year.

Miren Arzalluz, who stepped up to become the museum’s director general last April, learned the good news the day she allowed a journalist from El Pais newspaper to be a fly on the wall of the titanium-clad museum.

At a meeting with her director of development, she learned that attendance had already surpassed 1,233,000 visitors in early December, up 1% on 2024.

Next year’s program in Bilbao is strong. It includes a critically acclaimed Ruth Asawa show from SFMOMA, which travels via MoMA, and a big Jasper Johns exhibition, so hitting the 29 million mark will be a slam dunk

The Guggenheim Bilbao may have dropped long-held plans to open a satellite nearby in northern Spain, but Gehry's masterpiece with Jeff Koons’ giant floral puppy on its doorstep has gone from strength to strength over the past three decades.

Creating the museum, which opened in 1997 in the port city, was a close run thing, amid terrorism and economic decline.

Asked whether a Guggenheim could be built in Bilbao today, Arzalluz was more cautious than her predecessor, who said flatly: “No.” The daughter of a leading Basque politician, she opted for diplomacy, saying: “I want to believe so.”

To read more about Gehry and his architectural legacy in and beyond Bilbao, see his HENI News profile, here.

The generous spirit of John Giorno will live on in Bologna when the late US artist's first major show in Italy opens, complete with a 24-hour, free-of-charge telephone number.

Visitors who call +39 051 0304278 during the exhibition will be able to enjoy Dial-A-Poem Italy, an Italian version of the performance artist and poet's most famous work.

The work has been designed specifically for MAMbo, the city's Museo d'Arte Moderna, where the Giorno survey show is due to open in February and run through to May.

To find out more about Giorno and his many collaborators, see his HENI News profile here.

Robert Mnuchin, who has died aged 92, was a Wall Street trader who went on to become one of New York’s most respected gallerists.

He retired from Goldman Sachs in 1990 and launched a second career as an art dealer with his wife, Adriana. Their first gallery was housed in their East 78th Street townhouse. A partnership with Dominique Levy followed before Mnuchin launched his eponymous gallery in 2013.

As well as organizing museum quality shows and becoming a stalwart at major art fairs, he was a well-known figure in New York's auction salerooms.

Mnuchin was reportedly bidding on behalf of the hedge-fund billionaire Steven Cohen when the dealer made the winning bid for Jeff Koons’ Rabbit. The record breaking sculpture fetched $91m at Christie's in May 2019.

“The reason to buy art is because you love it, you love it, you love it,” Mnuchin once told The Times.

The number of paintings by Margaret Preston still missing after two years of searching by the National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne, which is now asking the public to help locate them ahead of a major survey of the Australian artist's career, opening next September.

France is celebrating the bicentenary of photography in 2026 and Paris' Maison Européenne de la Photographie will be at the center of events linked to the anniversary.

Which makes the arrival of its new director, Julie Jones, all the more timely. The institution, known as MEP, had been without a head after the abrupt departure of Simon Baker in September.

Jones leaves the Centre Pompidou where for the past 13 years she has been a curator in the photography department of the Musée national d’art moderne.

"The bicentennial is an extraordinary opportunity to celebrate photography, which has never ceased to evolve since its inception," she tells The Eye of Photography. "It serves as a reminder of how democratic, open, generous, and constantly reinventing this medium has been from Nicéphore Niépce’s first image to today’s AI-generated visuals."

Highlights of MEP's 2026 program include the show From A to Z: a History of Photography and Irving Penn's fashion photography.

1 - Dominique Savelkoul has left the European Fine Art Foundation (Tefaf) after just over a year as managing director. She was the fifth person in four years to hold the top job at the organization and leaves ahead of the next edition of its flaship fair in Maastricht.

2 - Arnulf Rainer, the Austrian artist best known for his pioneering overpaintings, or Übermalungen, has died aged 96. His death was confirmed by his gallery Thaddaeus Ropac.

3 - Croatian painter Grgur Akrap makes a delayed New York debut at The Hole Gallery in Tribeca tomorrow. "Shipping circumstances" meant that his solo show, False Prophet, did not open as planned last Friday.

4 - The French cultural crime wave continues with a member of staff at the Elysee Palace in Paris arrested for stealing from President Macron's official residence. Police were called after other staff members noticed Sevres porcelain and a Lalique statuette appear for sale online, including reportedly on Vinted.

5 - The chairman of the Tate, Roland Rudd, protests that its greatest works of art are on show and not hidden away, as critics have complained. He points to Mark Rothko's Seagram murals. They went on display in London's Tate Modern "as soon as they arrived home" after an unprecedented loan to the Fondation Louis Vuitton.