Who's afraid of Pablo Picasso? Certainly not Sophie Calle who turned his museum in Paris into an exhibition about herself when invited to respond to his works.

She did have doubts to begin with. Calle admits that when she was first invited to mark the 50th anniversary of Picasso’s death at the Musée Picasso she hesitated: “I could not face the overwhelming presence of his work.”

Covid proved a blessing in disguise. The museum was forced to close, his paintings were covered for protection and she immediately began photographing them.

Five paintings were away on loan, so she asked the curators, guards and other museum staff to describe them to her. “When [the paintings] returned, I veiled them in the memories they leave behind in their absence,” she explains of her series titled Phantom Picassos.

First shown in her take-over of the Musée Picasso in 2023, these works and others head next to Galerie Perrotin in New York for her solo show Behind the Curtain, which opens next week on September 4. The following day Paula Cooper Gallery opens its Sophie Calle show, featuring work she created at the Musée de la Chasse, also in Paris.

Meanwhile, Calle's museum retrospective is on its way to the West Coast where it is due to open at the Orange County Museum of Art in January.

Call it brinkmanship, or needs must, but the director of the Van Gogh Museum has raised the stakes in a dispute with one of the Amsterdam institution’s major funders: the Dutch government.

The museum’s director, Emilie Gordenker, told The Times she is prepared to close the building if the ministry of culture does not increase its funding for a major refurbishment.

She wants the government to boost its grant to nearly $13m a year to cover income lost during a three-year revamp due to start in 2028. The ministry is offering less than $10m.

The dispute is now headed to court.

The museum’s ace card could be the support of the Vincent van Gogh Foundation, which owns the collection. The artist’s nephew “V.W. van Gogh made an agreement with the Dutch state in 1962 and made his private collection available to the public domain. In return, the state must fulfill its statutory obligations,” the foundation said in a pointed statement.

London's Tate Gallery was conservative with a small “c” in the early 1970s, which made Robyn Denny's 1973 retrospective all the more remarkable. He was “only” 43 years old and the youngest artist to receive that honor.

The show included the abstract artist’s early experiments with mosaics. Fast forward five decades and six of Denny’s mosaics not seen since his Tate show will be among the highlights of an exhibition presented by Vardaxoglou Gallery in London’s Soho, opening next week.

Alex Vardaxoglou, who represents the artist's estate, tells us that one important mosaic has got away but he hopes to track it down. It was made by Denny in the late 1950s for an elementary school in Abbey Wood in south east London to enliven its play area. The school is still there but Denny's artwork is missing.

Denny was fresh out of the Royal College of Art and about to shake up the British art scene along with his contemporaries, Peter Blake and Pauline Boty, when commissioned by the London County Council as part of its innovative Patronage of the Arts Scheme.

Mosaics runs September 3 - October 4.

The age at which the photographer Don McCullin will make his New York debut. Hauser and Wirth presents a survey show of his images in September to coincide with his big birthday.

1 - Jeff Koons has rejoined Gagosian after a four-year gap, completing a move heralded in May by his solo booth with the gallery at Frieze New York.

2 - The former City of London Police sentry box co-opted by Banksy for his animal-themed series in 2024 is now in secure storage before it moves to a permanent home in the new-look London Museum.

3 - A Nazi-looted painting by the Italian artist Ghislandi recently spotted in a realtor’s advert was hastily removed from a villa in Argentina before a police raid. The property was listed by the daughter of a high-ranking Nazi who fled to South America.