From the $236 Million Klimt to the Louvre Heist, It Was a Wild Year in the Art World

2025, what a year! A lot happened in the art world. Let’s dive in, shall we?

The U.S. pavilion entrance in Venice, Italy.

Elisabetta Villa/Getty Images.

THE BIG PICTURE

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The Narratives That Shaped the Year

Cultural Commander-in-Chief

The big story of the year was the myriad ways that President Donald Trump’s direct actions massively affected our country’s cultural institutions. Whether it’s the new criteria for the artist who represents the US at the Venice Biennale, or a complete takeover of the Kennedy Center, where he’s now the board chair, or getting Smithsonian museum directors to resign after a single tweet—sorry, “Truth”—Trump has interfered with the arts and culture in ways most did not see coming.

Market Rollercoaster

The hope was that, with the unpredictability of the election behind us, the economy would stabilize and the art market would rebound from a two-year slump. Not exactly what happened—the fires were disastrous for LA, the tariffs wreaked havoc on the economy in general, and the art market kind of limped along. But then Art Basel in Switzerland was stronger than anticipated, Frieze London was a pleasant surprise for all involved, and Art Basel Paris was the juggernaut it was always going to be. By the end of the year, those who exhibited at Art Basel Miami Beach had to admit: The fair was way better than 2024.

Middle East Rising

In 2025, both Art Basel and Frieze announced they would open fairs in the region in 2026: Art Basel in Doha in February, Frieze in Abu Dhabi in November. It’s rumoured that Abu Dhabi’s sovereign wealth fund, ADQ, was the purchaser of the Klimt at Sotheby’s. Expect more action from that part of the world in 2026 and beyond.

French police officers stand next to a furniture elevator used by robbers to enter the Louvre Museum, on Quai Francois Mitterrand, in Paris on October 19, 2025.

Dimitar Dilkoff/AFP/Getty Images.

RIPPED FROM THE HEADLINES

The Year in Scandal

French Exit

The most shocking event on the art year calendar had to be the heist at the Louvre—a brazen crime at the world’s most famous museum hours before Art Basel kicked off the biggest cultural week of the year in Paris. The fair and all its satellite events happened as planned, and the Louvre even managed to reopen by Thursday…though if you were an Art Basel VVVIP, I reported that you could get a private tour of the museum even when it was closed to the public. Quelle fléx!

Battle of the Advisers

As Evgenia Peretz chronicled in the art package in the November issue: There once was a money-raking art advisory firm called Guggenheim Asher, and then Barbara Guggenheim and Abigail Asher sued each other. Things got nasty.

The Big Close

The Los Angeles gallery Blum reigned over the city for decades, first as Blum & Poe, and then just as Blum after Jeff Poe left and Tim Blum stayed. With no warning whatsoever, word trickled out this summer that Blum would be closing the gallery that was by all accounts thriving, and readying a New York outpost in Tribeca. Sadly, it was a data point in a trend—as the market corrected, many other once-thriving galleries threw in the towel, for reasons financial or otherwise. To give just a brief list, goodbye to: Blum, CLEARING, Venus Over Manhattan, Kasmin, Altman Siegel, Sperone Westwater, and LA Louver.

Tough Portrait

Cruel summer for the National Portrait Gallery. In May, Trump, who has no legal power to fire directors of Smithsonian institutions, wrote on Truth Social that he was “terminating the employment of Kim Sajet as Director of the National Portrait Gallery.” Again, he does not have the legal authority to do that, but regardless, Sajet resigned two weeks later. And then in July, Amy Sherald canceled “American Sublime”—coming off acclaimed runs at SFMOMA and the Whitney, and set to be the first show of a Black contemporary artist at the institution that first displayed her portrait of Michelle Obama—citing the planned censorship of her painting of a trans woman.

Up in Flames

What an ominous note to begin the year: In early 2025, fires raged through Los Angeles, leaving hundreds of artists homeless and without a studio. Frieze still opened its fair six weeks later, and the Oscars went down the month after that, but nearly a year later, the city is certainly still recovering.

Flames from the Palisades Fire reach the grounds of the Getty Villa Museum on the Pacific Coast Highway amid a powerful windstorm on January 8, 2025 in Los Angeles, California.

Apu Gomes/Getty Images.

AROUND THE INSTITUTIONS

Notable Museums Shows, in No Particular Order

• John Singer Sargent at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
• Rashid Johnson at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York
• David Hockney at the Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris
• Monuments at the Geffen Contemporary at MOCA, LA
• Kerry James Marshall at the Royal Academy, London
• Jack Whitten at MoMA, New York

WELCOME BACK

Museums That Reopened

• The Frick, Upper East Side
• The Studio Museum, Harlem
• The Breuer Building (but as Sotheby’s, not a museum), Upper East Side
• The Rockefeller Wing of The Met, Upper East Side
• The Yale Center for British Art, New Haven

WHITE HOT WHITE CUBES

Gallery Shows With Lines Down the Block and Wall-to-Wall on Instagram

• Jeff Koons at Gagosian, New York
• Laura Owens at Matthew Marks, New York
• Sasha Gordon at David Zwirner, New York
• Salman Toor at Luhring Augustine, New York
• Stan Douglas at Victoria Miro, London
• Dana Schutz at Thomas Dane, London

Gustav Klimt, Bildnis Elisabeth Lederer (Portrait of Elisabeth Lederer).

Courtesy of Sotheby's.

STICKER SHOCK

Big Price Tags

• Gustav Klimt, Portrait of Elisabeth Lederer, $236.4 million at Sotheby’s
• Claude Monet, Nymphéas, $65.5 million at Sotheby’s
• Mark Rothko, No. 31 (Yellow Stripe), $62.16 million at Christie’s
• Frida Kahlo, El sueño (La cama), $54.7 million at Sotheby’s, setting a new record for a work by a female artist at auction

LAST THOUGHTS

A Hastily Assembled Chronological List of Things I Enjoyed This Year

• Jay Carrier at 47 Canal, rest in peace.
• Several meals, and one casino-themed party, at Bridges on Chatham Square.
• Robert Rauschenberg’s 100-year-old cast iron stove at the Rauschenberg Foundation HQ on Lafayette Street, with his personal bottle of hot sauce untouched since his death. Bob liked Big John’s Famous Key West Hot Sauce, which sadly has been discontinued.
• Touring the sprawling multi-exhibition shows that Beth DeWoody had up at her West Palm Beach art space, The Bunker.
• Camille Henrot’s witty and unforgettable dog sculptures at Hauser & Wirth in Chelsea.
• Going through a mostly empty Dia Beacon with my daughter, looking at the Keith Sonnier show.
• A piece of paper hanging on the wall of an artist’s studio in LA with a bunch of names under the header “GOOD”: Thomas Nozkowski, Terry Winters, Amy Sillman, Manet, Stanley Whitney, Bob Thompson, Tintoretto, Agnes Pelton, Ron Gorchov, Albert Pinkham Ryder, Brice Marden, Joan Mitchell, Donald Judd, Charles Burchfield, Alice Neel, Albert York, B. Wurtz.
• The gigantic, very-much-once-living stuffed polar bear at Rosetta and Balthazar Getty’s house in West Hollywood.
• The Sarah Charlesworth show at Paula Cooper Gallery in New York.
• The seared diver scallops at Husk in Charleston, South Carolina.
• Hamilton Leithauser’s performance at Café Carlyle.
• New paintings by the mysterious artist Frisco Pete, on view at Reeves Art + Design in Houston, Texas.
• Getting a private tour of an empty Frick in the middle of the day.
• A night at the Power Station in Dallas, with an ingenious show of photography by Oto Gillen, and a performance by the Texas band Easy Sevens, fronted by artist Will Boone.
• Richard Prince’s rare book collection, full of items that left me speechless.
• Rashid Johnson’s opening dinner for his grand survey at the Guggenheim, held at the only correct place: The Grill.
• A full afternoon with the Manets at the National Gallery of Art, especially The Old Musician.
• The wonderfully eclectic permanent collection of truly out-there contemporary art that’s installed at the Booth School of Business at the University of Chicago.
• Dinner at Theaster Gates’s studio in Chicago, hosted by Bottega Veneta, featuring a kicking performance by the Black Monks of Mississippi.
• The Stanley Whitney exhibition at the ICA Boston.
• Keith McNally’s book party dinner at Balthazar.
• A dinner Marian Goodman Gallery gave for Pierre Huyghe at Overstory, 64 floors above Manhattan, the room so enveloped by fog that it felt like we were inside a Pierre Huyghe.
• The large bronze de Kooning sculpture Standing Figure, looking massive when at Gagosian’s 24th Street gallery—the first time it was ever installed in an indoor space. I’m used to seeing it installed outside.
• TLC as the surprise performer at the Whitney Gala in May, which raised over $7 million.
• Never-before-seen Picassos at Gagosian’s 980 Madison Avenue space, which miraculously has not closed yet.
• Clocking the abandoned Borscht Belt resorts while driving from Richard Prince’s secret town in the Catskills, thinking about his joke paintings.
• Anne Imhof’s incredible sculpture-slash-framing device at the Sky High Farm Biennial in Germantown, New York.
• The excellent string quartet performing at the opening of Sam McKinniss’s wonderful show at Jeffrey Deitch.
• The artist Ohad Meromi quit smoking and then made wooden sculptures of cigarettes, which he gave to his friends at his opening at 56 Henry.
• Taryn Simon’s photograph of Richard Prince, commissioned by Vanity Fair for my profile of him—look, I’m biased, I know, but it’s just a really, really good photograph.
• Steak au poivre at Bistrot des Tournelles, the best meal in Paris.
• George Condo’s letters to Bruno Bischofberger and Allen Ginsberg, included in his retrospective at the Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris.
• Alex Katz, 98 years old, and Joan Jonas, 89 years old, hanging out at Omen, the art world’s SoHo canteen, during the dinner for Katz’s show at Gladstone Gallery.
• “Monuments” at MOCA, and, presented concurrently, Kara Walker’s Unmanned Drone at The Brick. The artwork of the year.
• Seeing Romare Bearden’s Jammin’ at the Savoy on view at the newly reopened, totally gorgeous Studio Museum in Harlem. My dad had a poster of it in his office when I was growing up, but I’d never seen the actual thing, and got my nose right up to it, soaking in Bearden’s genius collage work.
• The vitello tonnato at Babbo.
• A black-tie dinner at the Temple of Dendur, the best place in New York City.

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