Environmental activists have hurled tomato soup at two Sunflowers works by Vincent van Gogh on show in the exhibition Van Gogh: Poets and Lovers at the National Gallery in London.
One of the works—Sunflowers (1888, National Gallery, London)—was previously the target of a similar incident in October 2022, for which Just Stop Oil activists Phoebe Plummer and Anna Holland received prison sentences earlier today (27 September). The second work involved in this most recent stunt was Sunflowers (1889, Philadelphia Museum of Art).
In an online statement, Just Stop Oil said that its supporters took part in the protest as “a sign of defiance after the original soup throwers, Plummer and Holland were imprisoned for up to two years at Southwark Crown Court today”.
At around 2:30pm, “three supporters of Just Stop Oil entered the Van Gogh exhibition at the National Gallery and proceeded to throw Heinz vegetable soup over two Van Gogh masterpieces: Sunflowers (1889) and Sunflowers (1888). The latter was splashed with soup by Plummer and Holland in 2022”, say the campaigners.
Ludi Simpson, one of the protestors involved in today’s actions, said: “We will be held accountable for our actions today, and we will face the full force of the law. When will the fossil fuel executives and the politicians they’ve bought be held accountable for the criminal damage that they are imposing on every living thing?”
The National Gallery says in a statement that the demonstrators “appeared to throw a soup-like substance over two works…. police were called and three people have been arrested. The paintings were removed from display and examined by a conservator. The paintings are unharmed. We are aiming to reopen the exhibition as soon as possible."
Louis Fratino, a painter from Baltimore who turned 30 last year, was already a global phenomenon before his debut at the Venice Biennale in April drew even more attention to his wide-ranging body of work.
His works are immediately compelling, drawing you into a self-contained universe that is rich with art-historical references. His subjects include quiet but emotionally resonant interior scenes and nude men embracing one another or engaging in sexual acts in scenes that feel tender and intimate.
Juan Manuel Silverio, a contributing writer for the biennale, writes that Fratino’s latest works “explore the ways in which LGBTQ+ people are socialized to navigate the world as an ‘outsider,'” and that he “juxtaposes the image of the family in contrast with visceral homoerotic imagery as a way to visually complicate the tensions between the two.”
Louis Fratino, An Argument (2021). Image courtesy Sotheby’s.
Fratino’s presence in Italy grows even larger today, with the opening of a major solo show at the Centro per l’Arte Contemporanea Luigi Pecci in Prato, “Louis Fratino. Satura,” which will include 12 new paintings, several sculptures, over 20 drawings and lithographs, and 30 earlier paintings. Mousse Press is publishing a book in conjunction with it that focuses on Fratino’s connection to Italy, where he has spent considerable time.
Meanwhile, Magic Hour Press, which is run by Jordan Weitzman, has just published a stunning monograph with beautiful color reproductions of a range of Fratino’s paintings, an essay by the Baltimore Museum of Art’s American art curator, Virginia G.M. Anderson, and a conversation between the artist and the veteran painter Carroll Dunham.
Louis Fratino, My meal (2019). Image courtesy the artist and Magic Hour Press.
The book has an eye-catching, collage-like image on its cover, a format inspired by the mid-20th-century periodical Verve from the French publisher Teriade. “It was a series of publications, each one dedicated to artists like Matisse, Picasso, and Miró,” Weitzman said. “Because Louis’s work references those artists so much we thought that would be a fitting reference. Printed in a run of 2,000, it has already sold out.
Below, a deeper look at the current market for Fratino.
– Lots sold: 41 – Bought in: 1 – Sell-through rate: 97.6 percent – Total sales: $3.1 million
Overall Performance
Auction record: $730,800, for An Argument (2021), which sold at Sotheby’s New York on November 16, 2022, against an estimate of $200,000 to $300,000.
Top painting price: Also $730,800, for An Argument (2021) in that November 2022 sale.
Lowest painting price: Morning Glory, (2017), an oil and pencil on canvas that sold for $42,851 (£35,300) at a Phillips London day sale in June 2022
Lowest overall price: $3,543 for Untitled (2018), an oil on card box sold at Christie’s First Open online sale on March 12, 2024.
Expert View: While primary market prices for Fratino’s paintings are typically in the low six-figures, his auction highs indicate just how strong demand is for his creations. At least five works have recently sold for over $500,000 each. (Works in other mediums can, of course, go for less: Artnet recently viewed an image of an ink on watercolor from 2018 that was offered privately by a dealer for $25,000.)
“In the past several gallery previews I have received with Louis Fratino’s paintings in them, the artworks are either already marked as sold or are listed with the qualifier ‘price upon application,’ both of which indicate high demand,” art advisor Liz Parks said in an email.
Louis Fratino, Covetousness (2019). Image courtesy Sotheby’s.
Lucius Elliot, vice president and head of contemporary marquee auctions for Sotheby’s in New York, said that Fratino “falls within that group of Brooklyn artists using figuration as a way of navigating identity politics,” and named Salman Toor, Julien Nguyen, and Doron Langberg as key contemporaries.
“Each work is a carefully observed world in miniature, though the mode of observation isn’t precious,” Anderson writes in her essay.
Experts said that while Fratino’s more sexually explicit paintings may have a more limited audience, demand for them is nonetheless intense. The Argument (2021), which holds his auction record, features nude men lying on opposite sides of a dividing wall in the wake of a heated fight. It was estimated at $200,000 to $300,000, but sold for $730,800.
The second-highest price on record is the $504,000 achieved for The Flower Market (2022), which sold at Christie’s this past May, trouncing its $200,000 high estimate.
Elliot said that galleries that show Fratino have long waiting lists for his work. In New York, that’s Sikkema Jenkins Gallery. (The gallery did not respond to questions about the artist’s market.)
The artist “doesn’t let [paintings] out of his studio with any great velocity,” Elliot said, adding that demand for Fratino’s work is “global,” with collectors coming from Asia, Europe, and the U.S. “They are largely younger collectors, at least in my experience,” he said.
The Appraisal: Fratino stands out for his unique vision and extraordinary skill; his beautiful, quiet interiors avoid feeling sentimental, just as his sexually frank scenes never feel explicit or confrontational. Demand for his work is vigorous across a wide range of subject matter, and given the scarcity of available material, buyers can expect those high-six-figure prices for his paintings to keep ticking upward.
Research is revealing the mood benefits of making intuitive decisions, but some situations call for an analytical approach
We make numerous decisions from day to day – some through deliberation, others more intuitively, from the ‘gut’. It’s only 7 o’clock in the morning, but I have already made a few gut decisions. I have a four-month-old son who was hungry at 5 am. After breastfeeding, he wanted to engage in our usual morning sing-song play. But, looking at him, I had the impression that he was still very tired. I don’t know exactly why; maybe it was something in his eyes, or the way he moved. Whatever it was, I listened to my intuition and decided to give him a kiss and leave him to sleep some more. I felt pleased in doing so. After getting back to bed myself, I realised that, unlike my son, I didn’t feel like sleeping. I already felt full of energy. Without thinking too much of it, I decided to make some coffee and took advantage of the calm to write this article.
Now take a moment to think about the decisions that you have already made today, whether they were big or small. Then consider this: did you decide after careful deliberation, or did you decide using your intuition? And how did you feel afterward?
These different approaches to decision-making – deliberate and intuitive – align with two modes of information-processing described in psychology. The first, more deliberate mode operates rather slowly, linearly and consciously. It operates, for example, when you try to solve ‘18 x 24’ or when you think about the pros and cons of spending your next holiday in Thailand. The results can usually be justified explicitly. For example, after carefully weighing which car to purchase, you could tell someone your reasons for choosing to buy this particular model and not that one.
The other, intuitive information-processing mode operates quickly and associatively. Its outcomes are experienced as gut feelings, hunches or intuitions. They can feel like knowing something without knowing how you know. They are strongly connected to affect and metacognitive feelings, such as feelings of rightness and confidence. When you make a gut decision at a restaurant, you have simply made a choice because it felt right – like the decisions I made this morning.
People who come to therapy suffering from depression often report difficulties with making decisions
My recent research findings suggest that people are often well-advised to decide intuitively, in terms of how it makes them feel. There is emerging evidence that the act of deciding – and, in particular, making gut decisions – is emotionally rewarding.
My interest in this possibility arose partly from my work as a psychotherapist. I have observed that people who come to therapy suffering from depression often report difficulties with making decisions. Patients also commonly report that they have lost trust in their intuition. ‘I have lost my inner compass,’ someone might say, or: ‘I used to rely on my gut, but that feeling is gone.’ My research colleagues and I have found mixed evidence on whether patients with depression have impairments in the processes that underlie intuition. Some findings suggested that people are less intuitive when they are anxious. My interest in intuition and wellbeing has since led me to explore the relationship between them more broadly.
A key hypothesis is that making decisions in daily life – especially intuitive decisions – makes people feel good. Why might this be the case? First of all, making a decision should make someone feel better because, by deciding, one regains cognitive resources for other tasks. Making a decision should also typically bring a person closer to their personal goals and help them to fulfil their needs. Intuition is especially important for this because it integrates a lot of information (such as bodily signals, emotional cues and environmental information) simultaneously into a coherent whole. In doing so, it might help someone come to a choice that is in line with needs they are not even aware of in a given moment. The satisfaction of a need usually makes people feel good. Finally, intuitive decisions are made more fluently than deliberate ones, and people tend to like what comes about fluently (and dislike what feels effortful and less easy).
To test our hypotheses, my colleagues and I asked university students to reflect back on decisions they had made that day and how they had felt before and afterwards. Generally, we found that they recalled feeling better after making a decision. And, in line with what we expected, this apparent mood change was more pronounced for decisions that people had made intuitively rather than deliberately.
We wanted to be better able to draw conclusions about cause and effect, so we recently followed up with an experimental field study, in which we randomly encouraged adults to decide either intuitively or deliberately as they went about their daily lives. For at least 14 days, participants in our project were asked to report to us online when they were about to make a decision – such as whether or not to meet a friend, what to eat, or how to solve a conflict with someone else. After receiving their prompt to make the upcoming decision intuitively (following their gut) or deliberately (thinking carefully and taking their time), they shared with us what they had decided and how they were feeling.
Day-to-day choices might lead to a stronger mood boost if you make them intuitively rather than deliberately
Again, we found that people generally felt better right after decisions – and that this mood increase was stronger after intuitive decisions, compared with deliberate decisions. This positive mood change after intuitive decisions even lasted until the implementation of that decision. Furthermore, people rated intuitive decisions as more satisfying and more in line with their preferences, and they were more likely to be implemented (eg, actually going to the gym after work, if that’s what was decided). We examined one of the expected mechanisms behind the positive mood changes – the ease of making decisions – and found that the more easily a decision was made, the better one’s mood afterwards. And intuitive decisions were made more easily than deliberate ones.
In many cases, gut feelings will accurately tell someone what is good for them in daily life because intuitions develop over time, based on the vast number of experiences that one has had. The more experience you have in a particular area, and the better the learning conditions were in which you developed your intuitions, the wiser it is to trust your gut. This could apply to decisions of the sort you’ve made many times before, and where the stakes of ‘getting it right’ are low: day-to-day choices about which meal to select, what movie to watch, or which shirt to buy might lead to a stronger mood boost if you make them intuitively rather than deliberately. At least, this is what our recent study results suggest.
To take a more complex example, if you have a vague feeling that your partner or friend might not be feeling well after a short phone call, you might be wise to follow your intuition, and go to see them. It is likely that many cues led to this intuition, from their tone of voice to the subtle pauses in between sentences, cues that are meaningful to you because of your extensive experience with this person. If you follow your gut feeling in this situation, there is little downside, and you will probably feel better than if you first carefully weighed the costs and benefits of following up.
The other side of this, of course, is that intuitive decisions may not always be the most adaptive ones. This might be the case, for instance, when you have little clue about what the best decision is because you lack relevant experience. This might happen when you start a job in a new field, or if you have to respond to someone’s behaviour in an unfamiliar cultural context. While an intuitive decision in a situation where you lack experience might feel good momentarily, you may end up being better off if you think deliberately about different options and compare your initial gut reaction with what your ‘head’ is telling you.
My clinical work has shown me how much the usefulness of intuition depends on someone’s past experiences and the quality of their learning environment. I think of a patient of mine, a young woman who had difficulty forming close relationships. She felt most secure when she kept people at a distance, but she also felt very lonely. During our work, it became clear that she had grown up with a mother who was emotionally unpredictable – sometimes reacting warmly when she sought closeness, other times turning away and disparaging her. More or less consciously, she came to terms with simply not expressing her need for closeness anymore. With this lesson came a recurring gut feeling that led her to choose to remain distant and cool in social situations. Although following this intuition made her feel safe and good in the short term, it was not helping her build trusting relationships. Intuition was leading her astray.
In these and countless other circumstances, intuitions can have a major impact on what people think and do. They have a great potential, not least because the underlying unconscious processes are linked to our preferences and past learning experiences. In many everyday situations, following a gut feeling will make you feel good in the moment, and sometimes it will also carry little risk. Please, in those instances, go with your gut. But in some other cases, our personal preferences may not be ideal for guiding a decision, or we have had experiences that taught our gut the wrong lesson. Sometimes it’s better to think things through rather than rely on intuition. Fortunately, as we face these various situations, we have both options at our disposal.
In 1541, Venetian nobleman Giovanni Corner was riding high. Still in his thirties, Corner occupied a lofty position in the Republic’s governing body and had recently purchased a Renaissance-style palazzo on the Grand Canal. To embellish the building’s interior, he turned to Giorgio Vasari whose Mannerist paintings were highly fashionable.
For the coffered ceiling of the palazzo’s camera nova, Vasari floated a grand celestial scene extolling the five virtues. Charity hovered at the center. She’s personified by a maiden in flowing scarlet robes who lifts up a basket bearing a mother bird that pierces itself to feed its offspring. Allegorical visions of Hope, Faith, Patience, and Justice encircle her with the room’s corners occupied by four putti, chubby cherubs.
Spread across nine panels, the work graced the Palazzo Corner-Spinelli for more than 200 years, standing as a reminder of why Vasari proved so influential upon the likes of Tintoretto and Titian. Then, in the mid-18th century, the wooden ceiling was gradually broken up and scattered across private European collections.
Giorgio Vasari, Charity (1541). Photo: Gallerie dell’Accademia/Matteo De Fina.
This was deemed a great shame by Venice’s authorities and so, in 1980, a process to locate and recover Vasari’s masterpiece was initiated in coordination with Italy’s Ministry of Culture. Now, after more than 40 years of painstaking research and restoration, the ceiling has been reassembled and returned to public view in a specially designed room at Venice’s Gallerie dell’Accademia. The fillip? It’s the 450th anniversary of the death of the Tuscan painter.
“The recomposition of Vasari’s work adds an important piece to the understanding and reading of the history of art,” said culture minister Gennaro Sangiuliano in a statement. “The panels painted by the genius from Arezzo can finally be returned to the public.”
The first panel was unwittingly reacquired in 1980. Some of the panels were cut in two and when the State purchased a small painting on wood depicting the death of Judas, it sent the work to the Vasari House Museum in the painter’s hometown of Arezzo, unaware that it belonged to the allegory of Hope. This speaks to an aspect of the painting that has only been belatedly realized by art historians: Vasari balanced a positive portrayal of each virtue with a negative example.
Giorgio Vasari, Hope (1541). Photo: Gallerie dell’Accademia/Matteo De Fina.
Momentum picked up in 1987 through the sweeping acquisitions of the panels of Justice, Patience, and a pair of putti. A breakthrough came in 2002 when the Gallerie dell’Accademia secured the work’s centerpiece, Charity, which had belonged to Pinacoteca di Brera, Milan’s main public gallery, since the 19th century. Faith was found in London in 2013 and with the acquisition of Hope four years later, plans on how and where to showcase Vasari’s work were set in motion.
Giorgio Vasari, Putti (1541). Photo: Gallerie dell’Accademia/Matteo De Fina.
First, however, the panels needed to be restored, no simple task given each had received markedly different treatment over the past 300 years. Vasari’s fluid style of loose details worked when seen from a distance below, but up close they appear sketchy and had been altered. “Chastening garments” had been added to the putti, a range of varnishes had been added, and wood-eating insects had bored into several panels. The greatest loss, said restorer Rossella Cavigl, is the disappearance of the richly decorated frame that wove the panels together.
Two fragments remain outstanding, the final putto and the portion cut away from Faith. There’s space for them in the Venice installation, if and when they reappear.
A man destroyed a porcelain sculpture by Ai Weiwei seemingly on purpose during the opening reception of an exhibition dedicated to the Chinese dissident artist on Friday evening in Italy.
The destroyed work was Ai’s blue-and-white Porcelain Cube, which was included in a survey on Ai titled “Who am I?” at the Palazzo Fava in Bologna, which opened to the public on Saturday.
Footage of the destruction was captured on CCTV and posted to Instagram by Ai. In the video, the man steps onto the plinth that holds the Cube and pushes it forward, shattering the work. He then lifted up a portion of the broken porcelain over his head. The work was installed in an atrium near the museum giftshop and ticket office.
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The Bologna edition of Milan-based daily newspaper Corriere della Seraidentified the man as 57-year-old Czech Vaclav Pisvejc, who was stopped by museum security and detained until police arrived. It is still unclear how he entered the museum during the invite-only reception. He was arrested for “destruction, dispersion, deterioration, defacement, soiling and illicit use of cultural or landscape assets,” according to the paper.
Arturo Galansino, the exhibition’s curator and the director general of Fondazione Palazzo Strozzi in Florence, told Reuters, “Unfortunately, I know the author of this inconsiderate gesture from a series of disturbing and damaging episodes over the years involving various exhibitions and institutions in Florence.”
Pisvejc has previously committed acts of vandalism related to art. In 2018, he attacked the artist Marina Abramović by smashing a painting over her head in Florence, and in 2023, he climbed naked, with the word “Censored” painted onto his body, onto the famed statue of Hercules and Cacus in Florence’s Piazza della Signoria during an award ceremony, according to Corriere.
After seeing the work’s destruction, Ai said, “I hope for his sake that he didn’t hurt himself on the pieces of porcelain,” according to Corriere. The work was removed and covered. A photograph of the unbroken piece is to be placed on view where the work once stood. The exhibition, which runs through next May, opened as planned on Saturday.
Nearly a decade ago Susan McKinney took a three-month sabbatical from her full-time industrial design job to explore her interest in ceramics. She participated in artist residencies in Denmark and Greece, and soon realized that she was ready for her next pivot. “It was amazing to see the progress and evolution in such a short period of time,” McKinney says. “It became clear that it was time to take everything that I’d learned, venture out, and create something of my own.”
Susan McKinney
McKinney now runs STUDIO SUSAN in Sausalito, California, where she makes a range of pieces, from wall hangings to vessels, for collectors and commercial clients. Yet even as a successful maker with a thriving business, she is often reminded of those who told her that a career in art was an unrealistic dream. Those early days serve as motivation, as do the words of encouragement she still receives from family and friends. Meaningful expressions of support are the fuel that keeps her going through every ebb and flow.
The designer, a self-described sentimentalist, has a home full of treasures. One of her most prized possessions is an articulating wooden doll made by her grandfather decades ago. A farmer in rural Missouri, his life was filled with chores, yet whenever he had a spare moment he would carve or whittle. McKinney did not realize it at the time, but his willingness to exercise his imagination purely for play inspired her to follow her own passions.
Now she strives to connect individuals to that same sense of wonder – while also nurturing her own. “I like to explore the undiscovered possibilities of materials and take risks to do something new,” McKinney adds.
I’m a huge Outkast fan, and when I heard André 3000 was coming out with New Blue Sun, his experimental flute album, I got so excited. It’s spontaneous, rebellious, transcendent, and totally calming. I admire him for embracing a new world and creating something completely different than what he’s known for. He’s an amazing and talented artist – and that shows whether he’s rapping, playing a flute, or just wearing his overalls.
Located on Teshima Island in Japan and created by artist Rei Naito and architect Ryue Nishizawa, the concept is in complete harmony with the surrounding nature. The shape of the building is based on a water drop, with two openings in its organic and horizontal interior space. The wind blows, birds chirp, water trickles on the ground, and you become completely present in the moment. If you have a chance to visit it is pretty mind-blowing.
I know that calculators come default with our computers and phones, but as a small business owner with a limited attention span I find the digital calculators unsatisfying. I struggle in a world where everything is seamlessly integrated on a screen. I recently went on a trip to Japan and bought a nice handheld Casio calculator with big buttons! The satisfaction of doing mundane calculations has increased tenfold.
Simon was part of the original Alexander McQueen team, and I adore everything he does. One of the most impactful shows I saw in my early design career was Savage Beauty at The Met museum in New York, and I remember just being in total awe the whole time. Simon now rehabilitates clothes for his line When Simon Met Ralph, with his unique printing and textile manipulation techniques. He asks us to look at what we have, reimagine it, and mess it up a little. I’m always trying to remind myself of this when I want to buy something new.
5. Admiring Local Flora + Fauna
We are fortunate to live in one of the most beautiful places that I could have dreamed of in Marin, and so I find myself staring out of my windows quite a lot. Birds, squirrels, turkeys, and deer come through – it feels very Snow White. By far my favorite visitors are foxes. For a period of time they would come to take naps on cushions in our backyard. I would just sit and watch them, sometimes for hours. And incredibly, they somehow knew to lay perfectly in the middle of the cushion, just like we do.
Works by Susan McKinney:
Optical Tapestry Stoneware, porcelain, oak Photo: Mark Serr
Detail of woven amber glass, 2020 Photo credit: Mark Serr
Frame Tapestry – Lemongrass, 2023, Mason stained and glazed stoneware, white oak Photo: Susan McKinney
Signature Collection in Sky Blue, 2022, Stoneware, underglaze Photo: Mark Serr
Anna Zappia is a New York City-based writer and editor with a passion for textiles, and she can often be found at a fashion exhibit or shopping for more books. Anna writes the Friday Five column, as well as commercial content.
See how she creates her striking portraits that blend expressive linework with carefully detailed eyes, all set against bold, experimental backgrounds.
South Asia’s largest commercial art event, the India Art Fair (IAF) in New Delhi, will launch an offshoot next year in Mumbai. Named the India Art Fair Contemporary (IAFC), the expo will gather between 50 and 70 galleries, mostly from India, in Mumbai’s Jio World Garden between 13-16 November 2025.
Established in 2008 and wholly owned by the trade fair organiser Angus Montgomery Arts since 2019, IAF will hold its 16th edition in February next year, offering art from the late 19th century to the present day. The forthcoming Mumbai fair, in contrast, will exclusively show contemporary art (made after 1970) and design. The latter focus comes after IAF introduced a design section to its 2024 event, which was met with an “enthusiastic response”, says Jaya Asokan, the fair’s director, who will also lead the forthcoming Mumbai show.
Rumours of IAF expanding to Mumbai have circulated for years, even pre-dating the organisation's longstanding engagement with the city’s art scene, including sponsoring a talks programme during the annual Mumbai Gallery Weekend. But it has taken the fair's leadership until now to open in India's financial capital—a case of “waiting for the right moment”, Asokan says.
Others, however, felt the time had already arrived. Last year saw the launch of Art Mumbai, the city's first major art fair, whose inaugural edition featured around 45 exhibitors, including the leading Indian galleries Vadehra Art Gallery and Chatterjee & Lal. The second edition will be held this November at the Mahalaxmi Racecourse.
The dates of the inaugural IAFC will overlap exactly with those of the third edition of Art Mumbai, prompting questions as to how the two fairs will interact with each other. Asokan envisions a “collegiate” and “collaborative” relationship, saying that IAF has chosen the coinciding dates “to not split attention” and to help shape the week into a “major market moment for Mumbai", centred on “two dynamic fairs” as well as city-wide exhibitions and events.
“Other cities across the world hold art weeks with multiple fairs,” she adds. Moreover, the two fairs have “different orientations and distinct offerings”, with IAFC’s focus on design meaning that around half its participants would be unlikely to apply to Art Mumbai regardless.
Nonetheless, Asokan still expects there to be considerable crossover between the two exhibitor lists, including with some of India's leading galleries. Speaking on the dynamic between the two fairs, she says IAF is open to “future collaboration on events with Art Mumbai”.
Such sentiments are not loudly echoed by Art Mumbai’s co-founders, Dinesh and Minal Vazirani, who say they “do not understand the logic” of the two fairs sharing dates and "doubt the business sense of the decision". Dinesh Vazirani adds that the concurrent events, which will be held more than 10 km from each other, will force a number of galleries to be “overstretched” that week. Asked if Art Mumbai is open to future collaborations with IAFC, he says his team currently have their “hands full”.
What all parties do agree on is that the arrival of IAFC is a clear vote of confidence in Mumbai’s collector base, as well as the wider market for South Asian Modern and contemporary art, which grew “around 250% in the past decade”, Asokan says. She also notes that a small handful of prominent Indian galleries founded outside of Mumbai, such as Nature Morte and Experimenter, have in recent years opened outposts in the city, boosting its status as an art market hub.
The inaugural edition of IAFC will offer more cutting-edge and "ultra contemporary" work than its New Delhi counterpart, along with international names "rarely shown in India", according to an official release. In addition, "taking its cue from Mumbai’s historic significance as a port city, the fair will place a special curatorial focus on artists and designers from the greater South Asian, African and South American regions".
A version of this article originally appeared in The Back Room, our lively recap funneling only the week’s must-know art industry intel into a nimble read you’ll actually enjoy. Artnet News Pro members get exclusive access—subscribe now to receive the newsletter in your inbox every Friday.
Optimism abounded after the Labour Party swept the U.K.’s July election, but there’s been nothing but pessimism (or maybe just realism) out of 10 Downing Street ever since.
Many in the culture sector have been willing the onset of another “Cool Britannia” movement under the new government—a reference to the cultural phenomenon of the late 1990s under a previous Labour leader, Tony Blair, which brought the world everything from the Spice Girls and David Beckham to the YBAs. And it almost seemed like history would indeed repeat itself when Oasis announced a reunion tour a few weeks ago, but Chancellor of the Exchequer Rachel Reeves has been insistent that, unlike the ’90s, there is no money in the country’s coffers. In fact, there’s a £22 billion ($28.8 billion) budgetary black hole that is going to make things worse before they get better.
Such was the backdrop to London’s Art Business Conference on September 10, where speakers ranging from Christie’s CEO Guillaume Cerutti to Chris Bryant, the recently appointed minister of state for the department of culture, media, and sport (DCMS), convened to discuss the state of the U.K. art industry. To sum up the day in just a few words, it would suffice to say: Britain is broke. But is there a way to build its culture sector back up? Here are our five key takeaways from the conference.
1. There’s a Big Tax Problem
One major point of discussion since Labour came to power is how proposed tax hikes may lead to a millionaire drain from the U.K. as they flee to countries with lower tax rates. Although Christie’s canceled its London summer sales this year, Cerutti maintained that any wealth exodus from Britain would not have a “seismic” effect on sales there. Even as Paris’s marketplace has grown, he said that, concerningly, Europe overall has been on the back foot globally, and that within the last decade or so, the number of buyers from the region (including the U.K.) fell 37 percent. Over the same period, the number of buyers in the U.S. and Asia has grown by roughly 30 percent.
Christie’s CEO Guillaume Cerutti at the Art Business Conference, London 2024. Photo: David Owens.
But issues with the country’s policies extended beyond just concerns over a wealth tax. The U.K.’s Temporary Admission scheme—introduced after Brexit to suspend import Value Added Tax (VAT) on goods, including art and antiquities, when they are being re-exported—has been a “bureaucratic nightmare,” according to Martin Wilson, the recently appointed chairman of the British Art Market Federation (BAMF). Why? Because it requires dealers to guarantee VAT before the destination of the artwork is known. He proposed that the government emulate the U.S. with a destination tax.
2. Proportionality Is Key
BAMF’s Wilson also said that “proportionality is key” when it comes to regulation in the U.K. art market, adding that recent anti-money laundering legislation (AML) was like “using a sledgehammer to crack a nut” for many dealers. That sentiment was echoed by Liz Chilcott, a representative of the Society of Fine Art Auctioneers, who said that the big three houses have entire departments devoted to AML regulation and essentially operate as banks themselves. However, most auction businesses are small, regional outfits and “simply don’t have the staff or time” to navigate the laws, nor do the price levels they are selling at generally warrant the same kind of regulation, Chilcott said.
3. Small Galleries Need Big Support
Overregulation in the U.K., as well as macroeconomic factors like inflation and the country’s cost-of-living crisis, have also put smaller galleries under pressure, leading to issues of “asymmetry” in the art world. Rakeb Sile, the co-founder of Addis Fine Art, said that “80 percent of business is done by 10 percent of the galleries,” referencing larger mega galleries, which leaves “90 percent of galleries fighting for 20 percent of the market.” She added that small galleries are the “investment engine” of the art trade, but once an artist’s career starts to take off and the gallery starts to see a return on that investment, they are poached by a larger outfit.
Addis Fine Art founders Mesai Haileleul and Rakeb Sile. Courtesy of Addis Fine Art.
How can smaller galleries be fairly rewarded for what they contribute to the art ecosystem? Sile, whose firm focuses on art from the Horn of Africa, argued that mega-galleries should collaborate with smaller, specialized dealers who are subject-matter experts when they take on an artist who is “ready to go blue chip.”
That was a sentiment echoed by Crispian Riley-Smith, who is a market veteran of 30 years specializing in Old Master drawings. He is now managing director and CEO of Art Advisory Group Ltd, which is a new venture that advises on succession planning. He also noted that when a gallery decides to exit the market—which happens frequently these days, often due to economic pressure—dealers think all their value is in their stock, which they bring to auction or sell somewhere else. But there is “plenty of value in their expertise,” he said, adding that dealers should not be shy about monetizing their knowledge or their client base.
4. Funding Is in Crisis
It’s not just commercial businesses that are suffering under the U.K.’s current tax structures. There are also fewer tax incentives to support nonprofits like museums and public galleries in the U.K., especially compared to the U.S., according to Fatoş Üstek, the author of The Art Institution of Tomorrow: Reinventing the Model (2024) and curator of Frieze Sculpture in London. She said that the U.K.’s Gift Aid scheme, which broadly allows individuals to claim back 25p of every £1 (25 percent) they donate to a charity, doesn’t offer as much tax relief as a donation to a 501(c)3-registered nonprofit in the U.S. (According to the Internal Revenue Service, in most cases, the amount of charitable cash contributions U.S. taxpayers can deduct is up to 60 percent of the taxpayer’s adjusted gross income.) The result? The U.K. tallied $10.5 billion in Gift Aid in 2023—or just 1.89 percent of what the U.S. brought in through donations to charities ($557.1 billion).
Charlene Prempeh, Charlotte Appleyard, Jennifer Schipf, and Fatoş Üstek speak on a panel about the future of creativity at the Art Business Conference in London. Photo: David Owens.
Üstek noted that, given the vastly larger population of the U.S. than the U.K., the total amount of charitable giving across the pond would always be higher, but she emphasized that the current Gift Aid system could be improved upon to incentivize public giving, especially as many arts institutions find themselves relying increasingly on private rather than government funding. Speaking of government funding, or the lack thereof, Eliza Easton, the founder of the Erskine Analysis think tank, noted that the U.K. is far behind its European neighbors in terms of cultural spending.
Meanwhile, Charlotte Appleyard, the deputy director of development at the Royal Academy of Arts in London, said that the language around funding in the arts “is often couched in [corporate terms like] ‘KPIs’ and ‘deliverables,'” metrics of success that are predicated on a final product and that do not correspond with what artists and institutions often need: time and basic resources to make work and exhibitions. To help institutions keep the lights on, she advocated for the Labour government to implement a tourist levy—a practice standard across much of Europe in which tourists pay a small daily fee, at least part of which is dedicated to the upkeep of cultural institutions and sites—and to better incentivize private patronage.
5. An Emphasis on Education
A major part of Labour’s plan for culture (as minimal as it is so far) has been to reverse declines in art education, and Chris Bryant, the culture minister, reinforced this by saying that the government is committed to putting “more art in schools from early years” and developing more art-business training programs to improve access to culture.
Students at the Courtauld. Photo: Ed Hands, courtesy of AHLU and the Courtauld.
To that end, the Courtauld Institute of Art used the conference to announce its new master’s program in art and business “to equip students with all the skills and knowledge they need to succeed in today’s art market,” according to the school’s director, Mark Hallett. There will be 24 seats available when it begins in 2025. No details were given about its tuition fees, but current M.A. programs at the school range from around £15,000 ($19,700) per year, for U.K. residents, to nearly £30,000 ($39,400) for international students.
Hallet and Bryant did not address issues of chronic underemployment for graduates with arts degrees, the stagnant wage growth for culture workers in the U.K., or the increasingly small pool of jobs in both arts institutions and commercial galleries, due to funding cuts and economic pressure.
“We decided to focus on what parents think because they know better what’s appropriate for their children than any tech company, any private company, any senator or policymaker or staffer or regulator.” – The New York Times
In early March 2022, when his country seemed in danger of falling to the Russians, it occurred to Leonid Marushchak, a historian by training, to call the director of a museum in eastern Ukraine to check that a collection of 20th-century studio pottery was safe.
He had loved the modernist works by artist Natalya Maksymchenko since he had encountered them almost a decade earlier. There were vessels covered with bold abstract glazes in purple, scarlet and yellow; exuberant figurines of musicians and dancers with swirling skirts; dishes painted with birds in flight. The collection was the radiant highlight of the local history museum in Sloviansk, the ceramicist’s home town.
It was remarkable that they were in this small museum at all. Though she was born in Ukraine in 1914 and studied in Kharkiv, Maksymchenko had lived the rest of her life in Russia. But, after her death in 1978, her family, fulfilling her wishes, oversaw the transfer of about 400 works from her studio in Moscow to the city of her birth. It was a deeply resonant act. When the historic traffic of artworks has so often been from Ukraine to Russia, when artists’ national allegiances have been subsumed by the Soviet Union, when works in international museums by Ukrainians (such as Kyiv-born Kazimir Malevich) have been routinely labelled “Russian”, Maksymchenko’s final gift to her home town and country seemed like a statement of defiance.
Now, as the Russian army inched nearer and nearer to the museum, Marushchak worried that these works in delicate porcelain could be destroyed by a missile in a moment – or, if Sloviansk were occupied, taken by the invaders back to Moscow. Had the ceramics been prioritised for the first round of evacuations, Marushchak asked the museum director on the phone.
“Lyonya, what round?” came the reply. “We still haven’t got the order to evacuate!”
Marushchak phoned his friend Kateryna Chuyeva, who was then Ukraine’s deputy minister for culture. “Katya,” he asked her, “why have you still not given the order for the Sloviansk museum?” She explained that she couldn’t just authorise it herself – the regional authorities needed to request it first. So he called the region’s culture department. They said that to issue an order, they would first need a full list of items to be evacuated.
Marushchak was furious. The situation was urgent; there was no time for that kind of paperwork. “Let’s just say I have sometimes had to take my time and breathe slowly,” said Chuyeva, in the face of her friend’s sometimes volcanic passion. She found a way to break the bureaucratic impasse. Before the official order had even arrived, Maruschak was on his way to Sloviansk.
Marushchak cannot drive. When I asked him why he hasn’t learned, he joked that if he had a licence, he’d have long ago driven to Russia to try to bring back Ukrainian artworks that have, over the centuries, been taken from his country. Without his own means of getting to Sloviansk, Marushchak had his brother-in-law drive him from Kyiv 300 miles east to the city of Dnipro. From there, friends took him a further 50 miles, to the city of Pavlohrad. Then he walked to the last checkpoint in town and hitched a lift for the last 120 miles – this time, on a Soviet-era armoured personnel carrier.
In Sloviansk, artillery boomed alarmingly close; the opposing armies were fighting over a town only 18 miles away. When Marushchak reached the museum, staff were finally packing up the exhibits – though, to his annoyance, the official instructions on what should be prioritised dated from 1970, and stated that what he referred to as “an old bucket of medals” from the second world war should be rescued first. Aside from the Maksymchenko ceramics and the medals, there was also a natural history collection to deal with – AKA, stuffed animals, which, just to add another layer of danger to the enterprise, had probably been preserved with highly toxic arsenic. Into Marushchak’s ark – in reality, a police van that deputy minister for culture Chuyeva had managed to commandeer for him – went a moose, a bison, a fox, a wild boar, a wolf and a small herd of deer. All were spirited on a long journey west to a safer location.
Leonid Marushchak with artworks from his private collection, built up over many years. Photograph: Julia Kochetova/The Guardian
Since those early days of the war, with the help of a motley group of intrepid friends, Marushchak has achieved something quite extraordinary. He has organised the evacuation of dozens of museums across Ukraine’s frontline – packing, recording, logging and counting each item and sending them to secret, secure locations away from the combat zone. Among the many tens of thousands of artefacts he has rescued are individual drawings and letters in artists’ archives, collections of ancient icons and antique furniture, precious textiles, and even 180 haunting, larger-than-life medieval sculptures known as babas, carved by the Turkic nomads of the steppe. “At times,” said Chuyeva, “he has been doing almost unbelievable things” – putting himself into extreme personal danger for the sake of often humble-seeming regional museum collections on Ukraine’s frontline.
A nation’s understanding of itself is built on intangible things: stories and music, poems and language, habits and traditions. But it is also held in its artworks and artefacts, fragile objects that human hands have made and treasured. Once lost or destroyed, they are gone for ever, along with the stores of knowledge they contain, and potential knowledge that future generations might harvest from them. For Marushchak, his country’s culture, no less than its territory, is at stake in this war: a culture that Vladimir Putin has repeatedly claimed has no distinct existence, except as an adjunct to Russia’s.
On that day in Sloviansk, something became clear to him: there was no point relying on official evacuation efforts. If he wanted to see the job done, he was going to have to do it himself. “He had to do it with his own hands,” his friend, the artist Zhanna Kadyrova told me. “There was no one else.”
Marushchak, 38, is a tall, fair, round-faced man with a clipped beard and a close-shaved head. When he smiles, he radiates an intense sunniness, but in the background one senses a volatile weather system that might abruptly cloud into fury. Moods – impatience, frustration, delight – flit across his face in quick succession. The first time we spoke, in the autumn of 2023, at a cafe in Kyiv, he seemed anxious almost to the point of hostility. He drummed a set of keys nervously against the tabletop, talking so rapidly, and scattering so many conversational tangents, that it was hard to keep up. Yet the more we spoke, during the following spring and summer, the warmer he became. He is a person who, once he has decided to commit to something, becomes unshakeably attached. (When I asked his wife, Marta Bilas, how she would describe him to a stranger, she said “stubborn”.) “He lives his project. He thinks on a different scale from most people,” his friend Arif Bagirov told me.
Bagirov, a reformed “hooligan” (his word), from the now-occupied east of Ukraine, is one of the tight group of helpers who have worked with Marushchak, trusting him with their lives in the most perilous of situations. Others include a team of drivers including Marharita Kravchenko, a self-possessed young woman with razor-sharp cheekbones; Zhanna Kadyrova, one of Ukraine’s most celebrated artists; and Diana Berg, a glamorous, twice-displaced activist and arts manager who fled Russian-occupied Donetsk in 2014 and then the besieged Mariupol in 2022. “We are like partisans, like guerrilla fighters,” said Marushchak.
One day this spring, in his flat in Kyiv, pouring glasses of rosé and radiating bonhomie, Marushchak pulled out some of his own treasures, artworks that he has collected over the years – an early 20th-century oil painting of the apricot groves and slag heaps of the Donbas; red-glazed 1960s studio pottery by Nina Fedorova; a cheery 20th-century folk appliqué textile; a cross-stitch embroidery depicting national poet Taras Shevchenko; a 19th-century icon. Marushchak is one of life’s enthusiasts, deeply knowledgable and passionate about Ukraine’s artistic history – and, after a decade working with museums in eastern Ukraine, he happens to know the museums that have ended up on Ukraine’s frontline like no one else.
Until recently, he has done his evacuation work in secret. This is the first time he has spoken of the work to a journalist. Even Bilas, his wife, hasn’t always known the full story. During the chaos of the first few months of war, the couple were flung from their home in Kyiv to different parts of Ukraine. Unbeknown to Bilas, while she was living with her parents in the far west of the country, Marushchak started making daily 300-mile round trips to the capital. Each morning, with his brother-in-law at the wheel of Bilas’s black Mini Countryman, he would take humanitarian aid into Kyiv – and each afternoon he would take art out. “At that time no one knew whether Kyiv would fall under occupation. And if it did, at some point the Russians would target museum collections and archives,” Marushchak told me.
One of his first big evacuation missions from the capital was the family-owned archive of Viktor Zaretsky and Alla Horska, one of Ukraine’s most important artist couples of the 20th century. It felt especially important to Marushchak to safeguard this work: in the 1960s Horska had defied the Soviet regime to reassert suppressed national symbols – Ukrainian folkloric heroes, for example – in her sinuous, modernist drawings. She was, according to Marushchak, “basically the founder of Ukrainian identity in the 1960s”. (She was murdered in 1970, likely by the KGB for her dissident activities.)
When Bilas finally saw her car again after three months, on her return to Kyiv in May 2022, she noticed a pair of punctures in the s oft lining on the inside of one of the doors. “I asked Leonid and the guys, ‘Who’s been sleeping here in high heels?’ and they said, ‘Oh, so that’s from some horns.’” Unbeknown to her, they been using her car to evacuate a collection of taxidermy.
Part of the reason for secrecy was that Marushchak didn’t want to worry his wife. “For example, I didn’t know he went to Bakhmut about 27 times,” Bilas said. “I’d call and he’d say, ‘I’m busy, the phone is funny, the connection is bad.’” If she asked too many questions, he and his team would just “curl up like hedgehogs”, she said. That was despite the fact that she was raising money to support the evacuations, relying on donors who understood the need to release funds quickly with a minimum of bureaucratic fuss. In any case, she was herself too busy to pay too much attention to the details: aside from her day job in PR, at the start of the invasion she was asked by an old boss, who was by then working for the government, to assemble a team of linguists to translate Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskiy’s daily speeches into 14 languages, including English, French, Arabic and Chinese.
There were other reasons for secrecy, too. At one point Bilas came across a notebook in their flat “filled with symbols and weird code”. These were Marushchak’s records of storage locations. “If someone sees this notebook, I don’t want them to understand which collection went where and how is it packed and how’s it marked,” Marushchak said. (For this reason, Marushchak did not allow the stores to be photographed or inspected for this article.)
An antique religious artwork from Marushchak’s personal collection. Photograph: Julia Kochetova/The Guardian
For some of Ukraine’s cultural heritage, it is already too late: like the contents of Mariupol’s Museum of Local History, which succumbed to multiple fires during the aerial bombing of the city; like the 3,000 cultural sites that have been officially reported damaged or destroyed; like the uncountable ancient sites in Ukraine’s archaeology-rich east and south that have been wrecked. In many places, what has not been destroyed is vulnerable to theft and looting. In November 2022, just before they withdrew from the city, Russian occupiers loaded five truckloads of works from the Kherson Art Museum and drove them to Russian-occupied Crimea.
Artworks have long formed part of the spoils of war, but art is always more than simply a question of beautiful, desirable objects. Culture and politics are interleaved, as Ukraine’s history – so full of violence against culture and cultural figures – shows. The killing, in Stalin’s purges of the early 1930s, of an entire generation of modernist Ukrainian writers known as “the executed renaissance”, looms especially large for today’s cultural figures. In today’s war, occupying forces have seen the very act of writing in Ukrainian or owning Ukrainian books as a threat.
By the time Bilas was examining the strange puncture marks in her Mini’s upholstery, Marushchak was devoting his every waking hour to evacuating artworks and artefacts – taking the work upon himself when official procedures were neglected, unworkable or nonexistent. “He went to places where there was a very high chance of being killed or captured,” said Diana Berg, the activist, who helped the efforts by initially having the donations that Bilas raised flow through her cultural NGO. “He was ready to put his life on the line – for the history of our culture.”
Marushchak has conducted many of his missions with his friend, professional driver Yevhen Sternichuk, at the wheel. They have known each other for years, since Sternichuk was a kid at a summer camp in Crimea in the early 2000s, and Marushchak a camp counsellor. There still seems something of that protective relationship about the pair. After the invasion in 2022, Sternichuk said, Marushchak called him straight away, checking if he needed help, or money. As soon as Sternichuk heard about Marushchak’s art rescue projects, he wanted to help.
By the summer of 2022, thanks to donations, Sternichuk graduated from driving Bilas’s Mini Countryman to a roomy van, a white Mercedes Sprinter. “I drove 60,000km in that van,” said Sternichuk fondly. On one trip, what at first felt like an enormous pothole turned out to be the shock waves from a supersonic bomber, which all but knocked the van over. Another time, a Ukrainian tank almost crushed them by accident. “We had some shenanigans together,” he said.
In April 2022, Marushchak and Sternichuk were regularly in Lysychansk, a city in the Luhansk region with a prewar population of about 95,000. Under relentless shelling, it was being reduced to rubble. Marushchak was keeping a watchful eye on the Lysychansk Local History Museum. Aside from the strong chance that it could be obliterated by a missile, he could see that people had been getting inside, perhaps looting it. In one of the rooms was an art installation by his friend, Mykhailo Alekseenko. It included a fur coat that had belonged to the artist’s grandmother, and a dining table set with elaborate glassware, “as if people had just left the table”, Alekseenko told me when we met in Kyiv. The artwork began haunting Marushchak whenever he saw it through the museum windows. Why hadn’t it been evacuated yet? “I started to terrorise the Lysychansk museum authorities,” he said. When Chuyeva, the deputy minister for culture, rang, “I told her, If they don’t let me have it, I’ll steal it.”
An installation by Mykhailo Alekseenko that features a fur coat that belonged to the artist’s grandmother. Photograph: Natalka Diachenko
The first Alekseenko knew about the rescue mission, he told me, was when he got a text message a couple of months later from Marushchak, as he was checking through the objects in the safe storage area: “Hey, how are you? We’re just refreshing the air around your family treasures – please tell me how many shot glasses there were?” Alexeenko still can’t quite believe what Marushchak did. “Imagine the surrealism. There are battles, shellings, noise, explosions, checkpoints every other step, and Lyonya drives in, saying ‘I need the fur. And I need the crystal.’”
Next, Marushchak set his sights on another museum, on the edge of Lysychansk, in a district that had been particularly heavily shelled. “No one wanted to go there with me, not even the military,” he remembered. But two people did volunteer: his local friend Arif Bagirov, and a friend of Bagirov’s, who goes by the call sign “Zombie”. (Such call signs are a borrowing from military parlance – soldiers are addressed by such nicknames as a security measure.) Bagirov, who has the creased face of a heavy smoker and the wiry physique of a long-distance cyclist, explained that in the 1990s, he and Zombie “were young, jobless men in this industrial city in which all the plants and factories had shut down. I used to do a bit of boxing,” he said, elliptically. “It was easy money and hard drugs.” He’d gone straight 20 years ago, he told me, but Zombie (“a good-looking lad, but dangerous,” he said) still attracted police attention.
For the mission, Bagirov acquired a red pickup truck, which he named Skrypa, or “Squeaker”. Together, the trio made their way to the palace of culture – whose facade has, or rather had, a Soviet mosaic depicting cheery cosmonauts, including Valentina Tereshkova, the first woman in space, now, from her seat in the Russian state duma, a hearty supporter of the invasion of Ukraine.
Upstairs was a small museum devoted to Volodymyr Sosiura, a poet who had worked in a factory in the city as a young man before the first world war. He wrote a poem that all Ukrainians know. “Love your Ukraine, love as you would the sun / The wind, the grasses and the streams together … / Love her in happy hours, when joys are won / And love her in her time of stormy weather,” runs the first verse.
Bagirov knew the place. “Lots of busts of the poet. Larger busts, smaller busts. Personal belongings,” he told me. “A regular Soviet memorial museum.” Despite its modesty, Marushchak remembered how artists he had brought there loved it. “The director would run to meet us – literally – and would be glad to see each new friend of ours that we brought along,” he recalled.
Arif Bagirov, part of the evacuation crew. Photograph: Julia Kochetova/The Guardian
As they drew up outside for this one last visit, so did a multiple rocket launcher system. It wasn’t that the Ukrainian MRLS was a danger to them: the problem was that if it fired at the Russians, the Russians would fire back.
It fired. “How long have we got?” asked Marushchak.
“Three to five minutes, maybe. Max 10,” said Bagirov.
Marushchak and Zombie dashed upstairs, where a museum employee was there to meet them. Waiting outside with the engine running, Bagirov took the opportunity to tuck into the burger that he had asked Marushchak to bring, as there was no fast food any more in Lysychansk. Inside the museum, Marushchak and the others rushed to assemble archive crates, take photos, open glass cases, pack objects. The prize artefact was Sosiura’s natty emerald-green trilby hat. They got the job done in 10 minutes and were out of there as the Russians started to return fire. Bagirov had just enough time to finish the burger.
From the summit of Mount Kremenets in eastern Ukraine, you can look down on the town of Izium, now a wreck of twisted metal and smashed buildings, and the endless forest and steppe beyond. Until recently, nine ancient sculptures stared out over this same view. They are larger and sturdier than living humans, with mighty hips and breasts. Age has blurred their facial features into inscrutability. Beside them, you feel a little smaller, a little more what you really are, which is to say a flimsy, short-lived creature of bone and muscle and soft tissue. Carved about 1,000 years ago by Turkic nomads of the steppe, the solemn figures have something of the presence of Easter Island moai.
Old they may be, but the babas, as sculptures of this type are known, are not indestructible. The area around Mount Kremenets was occupied at the start of the war, and retaken after a rapid Ukrainian counteroffensive in the autumn of 2022. A few days afterwards, as soon as he heard the army was planning to inspect and de-mine Mount Kremenets, Marushchak got on the road to check out the damage, not just to the babas, but to museums and other monuments in the area. Finding that one of the sculptures had indeed been damaged by artillery, he moved its broken parts to the Izium museum, and put a cover over its base to protect it. Later, he would organise the evacuation of the whole group, along with many others elsewhere in eastern and southern Ukraine.
Medieval sculptures known as babas stand on Mount Kremenets overlooking Izium in Ukraine’s Kharkiv region. One was damaged during Russia’s occupation of the area in 2022. Marushchak has since arranged the removal and safe storage of these and many similar sculptures across eastern and southern Ukraine. Photograph: Ed Ram/The Guardian
While in Izium, Marushchak learned that a group of soldiers had found a stash of icons – paintings of Christ or other religious subjects, and objects of veneration in eastern Orthodoxy. They had apparently been looted from different churches by the invaders, then gathered together and stored, likely with the intention of transporting them to Russia. Impulsively, Marushchak asked the soldiers to lead him to the place. He and his driver, this time a friend called Ivan Yatsenko, followed the soldiers to a village via a tortuous route that, without a GPS signal, the pair tried to memorise. The soldiers led them to a building beside a kindergarten: inside were stacks of artworks.
“Where are we?” asked Marushchak. The soldiers had no idea of the name of the village: what they did say was that they had found the icons after breaking through enemy lines, just that morning. Meaning: they were now in what was still, officially, Russian-held territory. No one was in a mood to linger. They stacked the paintings – some from as early as the 17th century, assessed Marushchak – into the van around a bronze, bespectacled memorial to Sergey Prokofiev that Marushchak and Yatsenko had rescued from the village where the composer was born in the Donetsk region, the previous day.
By now it was 11pm. Marushchak assumed the soldiers would escort them back to Izium, or at least a recognisable road – but they shrugged. They had to be on their way, they said. They were due back at their positions. Marushchak and Yatsenko were now on their own, on the wrong side of the frontline, with a van full of icons and a broken memorial to Prokofiev. They were illegally out after curfew, they had no documents to show that they weren’t looters, and they had no idea how they were going to get through the numerous checkpoints between them and the city of Kharkiv, more than 100km away. Worse, they had only a shaky notion of how to find their way back. Each placed their hope in the other’s ability to navigate their way back through the tangle of unmade roads.
To their relief, the many checkpoints they passed were unmanned – until, that is, they reached the outskirts of Kharkiv in the small hours. Marushchak, hands shaking, asked the soldiers manning the post to call the police (“the first time I’ve ever called the police on myself”). In the end, he said, the story of the vanload of treasures was so disorienting that the officer who turned up just let the matter go. The one thing that attracted his attention was an improperly secured gas cylinder. He said he’d have to write them up for that.
Fear is a curious emotion. At times, it arrives without warning or logic, unstoppable and blinding. At others, when its presence might be a useful warning against foolhardiness, it flees altogether. For some, it may become a familiar companion, less and less regarded as time goes on. “Of course I get scared,” Marushchak told me. “Only stupid people don’t get scared.” But he gets less frightened than he used to. On one occasion, describing what it feels like when a shell falls near you, he spoke in almost dreamlike terms: “You almost don’t hear anything, and hardly understand anything. And then you raise your head and you see that the leaves have fallen down from the trees. It is summer, the trees are bare, and you are covered in a blanket of green leaves as you lie there on the ground.”
When I asked Marushchak’s friend Arif Bagirov whether he had felt it worth the risk to his life to evacuate the Volodymyr Sosiura museum, he said, “I told myself, ‘Listen Arif, these are your last days. You might as well live them brightly. Make your death beautiful.’” And if he’d died for Sosiura’s hat? “That would have been the most beautiful death of all.”
Marta Bilas, wife of Leonid Marushchak, in Kyiv. Photograph: Julia Kochetova/The Guardian
Long after most of the inhabitants had departed, Bagirov chose to stay in his home town of Sievierodonetsk, which is just across the river from Lysychansk, even closer to what was then the frontline. Mostly, he was delivering aid to vulnerable people who had been unable to leave, riding the deserted shell-cratered streets on his beloved red bicycle (call sign: Mammoth). He and a group of students managed to evacuate a group of recently excavated ancient clay pots, decorated with incised geometric patterns, from the university. They date from between 2600 and 2000BC. Thanks to Bagirov, they survive yet.
When the Ukrainian military told him that it was time for him to leave, Bagirov gave them Squeaker, the pickup. Then he got on Mammoth and pedalled across the bridge and up the hill to Lysychansk. From there, “I looked back down and saw there was smoke coming out of Sievierodonetsk,” he said. “I thought, ‘Great, I’ve made it out.’ Then I looked in front of me and saw smoke there, too.” With no mobile signal, he hadn’t realised that the battle had already spread to the road to Bakhmut – his route to supposed safety. Somehow, he made the 40-mile ride unscathed. A few weeks, later, Sievierodonetsk fell to the Russians, soon followed by Lysychansk. Bagirov lives in Kyiv now, in the flat of a friend who is fighting on the frontline. He misses his old life.
But no one in Ukraine has their “old life”. Everyone lives closer to death than they once did; some people, terrifyingly close. “You acknowledge to yourself you might die. But it’s too early for me – I have cats at home that need looking after,” said Marharita Kravchenko, a professional driver who goes by the call sign Raketa (Rocket), who has worked with Marushchak on some of his most perilous missions. When I asked her why she had felt able to take such risks, she said, “It’s my land and my history. They come, they kill, they loot, but our future generations need to know who and what we are: that’s my motivation.”
She may have felt it was too early for her to die, but the relentless battle for Bakhmut told a different story. By December 2022, when she was regularly driving Marushchak in the region, the population had sunk from 72,000 to 12,000, most of whom were living in basements as the city above was, by degrees, razed to the ground. Russian mercenary leader Yevgeny Prigozhin was throwing soldiers, many of them convicts, into what became known as the “Bakhmut meat grinder”.
From this hellscape, Marushchak was determined to retrieve an important artefact: a unique carved lion, a sculpture of the same era as the medieval babas, from the Bakhmut Local History Museum. The plan was that Kravchenko would drive Marushchak to the outskirts of the city to rendezvous with the military, while she went on to a town about 18 miles west to wait for him.
Nothing went to plan. Kravchenko ended up driving Marushchak right into Bakhmut. Her father, a mortar operator in the Ukrainian army, happened to be stationed there; in Marushchak’s bleakly humorous account of the trip, he was more afraid of getting beaten up by Kravchenko’s dad for exposing his daughter to such danger than of death from the intense Russian shelling. At a bomb shelter they met a museum employee who gave Marushchak a map showing where the building’s main door key was hidden. As they arrived at the museum, people scattered – looters were trying to get in. Consulting the hand-drawn map, Marushchak scrabbled through the icy ground beneath a fir tree until he unearthed a pretty porcelain sugar bowl, which now sits on a shelf in his Kyiv apartment. The key inside it, though, was too rusted to work, and the lock seemed like it had been tampered with, anyway. They did find another door unlocked, leading to an empty basement room in which they found only a handgun – almost certainly left there by looters. As they filed a report on the weapon at the police station, a deafening boom sent them running to the basement, and the van’s roof was battered with shrapnel.
The lion’s rescue would eventually take place early the following year. Marushchak had sent Kravenchko away for a break. He went in alone, with the military. “There was already a Russian group in the city, fighting street by street with Ukrainian soldiers,” he recalled. The chances of getting to the museum again under such circumstances seemed minimal. They had, his military escort estimated, 15 minutes before the next wave of Russians reached them.
Driver Marharita Kravchenko, who helped Marushchak evacuate art from some of Ukraine’s most dangerous hotspots. Photograph: Julia Kochetova/The Guardian
They got the precious lion, but barely escaped with their lives. On the journey out of Bakhmut, a shell exploded right next to the vehicle. Somehow, none of them was harmed. When I asked Marushchak about the risks that he had taken for this, and so many other artefacts, he gesticulated airily towards central Kyiv around us. “It’s a war, you can die anywhere,” he said. “We could die right now, at this cafe.” Which was true, strictly speaking. But Kyiv in late spring, with its largely reliable air defence, its bars and its parks and restaurants, was a world way from the ruins of Bakhmut.
Marta Bilas, Marushchak’s wife – his calm, measured foil – told me that there was a point a few months ago when she realised she hadn’t seen the Mercedes Sprinter for a while. “I was like, ‘Where’s the van?’ And he said, ‘It’s in Nikopol.’ And at some point, I said, ‘Look, there is nothing there right now and most of the city is evacuated.’”
It was then that Marushchak finally told Bilas the truth about the Sprinter – and about everything else that she hadn’t known about the danger and the frequency of his missions. Or nearly everything. She still isn’t sure whether she knows every twist in the tale. A friend of hers once compared the situation to being friends with a couple when you know one is of them is sleeping with someone else. The dilemma, said the friend, is whether to say anything to the one being cheated on. Bilas rolled her eyes as she told me this. The analogy of her husband cheating on her with the cultural heritage of Ukraine was not necessarily one that she wished to dwell on.
What happened to the Sprinter was this. Marushchak, along with a driver called Dima Kapshuk, were in Beryslav, a town in Kherson region, close to Russian positions just across the Dnipro river. Kapshuk was packing a box into the van when he heard something – by the weird, gnawing sound of it, an Iranian-made kamikaze drone. He ran back inside the museum as it hit the van. Another drone hit something else, somewhere; a third, they could hear, was intercepted. Now came an even more terrifying sound: a Russian plane overhead. “It could have been about to drop a glide bomb,” said Marushchak. “And that would have taken out the whole museum, with us in it.”
Marushchak with the van they used to use, showing the damage it sustained in a drone strike in the Kherson region. Photograph: Julia Kochetova/The Guardian
Kapshuk ran outside. The back of the van was cratered, its body pitted with shrapnel holes, its windscreen broken, the shattered glass hanging concave in its frame. Somehow, though, the engine started. They got in, and Kapshuk drove the wounded vehicle to the relative safety of Mikolaiv, 85 miles away. In spring 2024, I went to see it in a yard on the outskirts of Kyiv, where Marushchak and Marharita Kravchenko reverently removed its tarpaulin covering and showed me its battered bulk. Lover of museums that he is, Marushchak would like to donate the Sprinter to the Mercedes-Benz Museum in Stuttgart.
The work goes on. It is harder, now, said Bilas: it takes her five days to raise the money she once raised in five hours. It is tougher psychologically, too. “I used to always be joking, ‘Oh, you guys moved so many collections. You will have so much work after the war to move it all back.’” That was when the war seemed like it might not last long. Now, she told me, that joke has worn thin. In places like Bakhmut, Sievierodonetsk and Lysychansk, there is nowhere left for the collections to return to. They are under occupation, with no immediate prospect of returning to Ukrainian hands. The cities that sustained the museums are rubble, their communities scattered or killed.
Marushchak’s friends are anxious about the toll his work is taking on him. “He saw so much pain and destruction, so many attempts to destroy everything Ukrainian,” said his friend Diana Berg. “He doesn’t know how to rest. He works 24/7,” said the artist Zhanna Kadyrova. “Even the most resilient person has his limits.”
And yet the importance of the often humble-seeming regional museums that Marushchak had helped safeguard is incalculable, Chuyeva told me, especially in the light of the losses that Ukraine has suffered to its culture over the centuries. “The problem is that we have so many gaps, we have so many lost objects and documents and traditions, that we just cannot go in this way any more,” she said. “We have to stop it, we have to protect what we do have.”
When Marushchak and I spoke for the last time for this article, it was on Zoom. He was mid-mission. Sternichuk was at the wheel of a van, and they had pulled off the highway into an Okko, the chain of service stations that has sustained many on Ukraine’s long roads during this war. Marushchak told me about going to the Kupiansk Local History Museum in Kharkiv region the day after it was destroyed by a missile attack that killed its director and another employee. He and others dug through the rubble and the wet clay of the soil, looking for the museum’s inventory books. “I will remember the smell of the wet clay for the rest of my life,” he said.
The pair were continuing to cover prodigious distances. The previous day they had driven from Kyiv to Kherson, via Nikopol. Today, they were between Kherson and Kharkiv. There was work to be done as the Russians tried to push their lines forward towards Ukraine’s second city. The whole trip added up to 708 miles. The following week, Marushchak sent me some photos and video from the Kherson region. A baba recumbent in the steppe, huge-hipped, hands clasped in front of its body, metres away from a shell-hole, was being gently lifted from the grassland, and taken to a place of safety.
Safeya Binzagr, a pioneering artist who eternalized folk heritage in her native Saudi Arabia, died on September 12 at 86. The news was first reported by the Abu Dhabi–based publication The National.
Binzagr’s trailblazing career revolved the idiosyncrasies of indigenous Saudi culture, which was increasingly imperiled by modernization in the mid-19th century. Aware of the limitations of oral histories—at the time, record-keeping was not common practice in the Arabian Gulf—Binzagr documented traditional architecture and domestic rituals over several years. Once settled, she translated these studies into intricate fabric collages, expressive sketches, and boldly colored paintings.
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Born in Al Balad in Jeddah in 1940, Binzagr grew up alongside the newly united kingdom. Oil money poured into immense urban projects, but arts infrastructure—the sort that sustains generations—was nonexistent. Options for an artist to succeed professionally were limited, and even more so for a female artist. That would change, in part, because of Binzagr.
She left Saudi to study in Cairo and, later, London, finally returning home in the late ’60s. As a teacher, she supported the creation of a context for regional art to be studied. And in 1968, along with her friend Mounirah Mosly, she exhibited at the Dar Al Tarbiya girls’ school, becoming one of two female artists to ever hold an art exhibition in Saudi Arabia.
“I thought, I will do the exhibition; they will receive it or they will object. If they do, I will try again,” Binzagr told Vogue Arabia, adding, “If you have the will, you will. Hard work always pays off and pushes you to be in the beginning of the line.”
In 1995, she opened the Darat Safeya Binzagr, the first and only cultural center in Saudi Arabia at the time. The classes for students and private courses for women, as well as a monthly women-only art salon.
Binzagr continued to exhibit widely in the region and Europe, becoming one of the first Saudi artists with an international audience. Her work, while hardly sidelined in the record of Arabian Gulf art, has in recent years gained new critical attention due to its inclusion in several high-profile exhibitions. Her portrait of a woman in yellow dress was a standout of the 2022 exhibition “Khaleej Modern: Pioneers and Collectives in the Arabian Peninsula” at the NYU Abu Dhabi Art Gallery.
Curated by Aisha Stoby with assistance from Tala Nassar, the show sought to make the first visual narrative of this region—a task that involved undoing Western misconceptions of the people who live there. Binzagr and her subject, vibrantly adorned and radiating selfhood, went a great deal to that end.
Binzagr also figured in the second edition of Saudi Arabia’s Diriyah Contemporary Art Biennale, which wrapped in May. Her art was on display in the section “Modern Legacies and Geopolitics,” a showcase of the previous generation of South Asian and Gulf artists, where it was among the best works on show.
She was represented by Turathuna (Our Tradition), 1997–99, a series of 39 photogravures. Each small white panel contained a watercolor painting of a woman wearing traditional Saudi garb.
Binzagr was honored in 2017 by King Salman bin Abdulaziz with First Class honors for her efforts to preserve Saudi art and culture.
