That puts the Paris auction house three blocks from its current location. The move is scheduled for mid-October, and is part of a larger strategy to expand Sotheby’s presence in France.

The house has previously announced plans to relocate two of its other spaces. In July, it will open a new Hong Kong location, and in 2025, Sotheby’s will move its New York space to the Marcel Breuer–designed Brutalist structure completed in 1966 for the Whitney Museum.

Sotheby’s new Paris headquarters will cover more than 10,800 square feet across five floors, offering 30 percent more exhibition space than its current location in the French capital. The venue, which is not far from the Champs-Élysées, will house a café and a wine cellar with a tasting area, and play host to year-round master classes, dining, and, of course, auctions.

The new Paris location will support Sotheby’s 15 specialist departments, covering areas such as ancient, modern, and contemporary art, as well as Asian and African art, design, luxury goods, and jewelry.

Upstairs will be a luxury showroom called “the Salon,” with items for sale at fixed prices, as well as rooms dedicated to private sales. Additional areas in the new Paris headquarters will provide spaces for concerts, parties, conferences, cocktail parties, fashion shows, and dinners. The auction house’s “state-of-the-art scenographic and technical equipment” will enable the exhibition of a wide range of works and objects.

The building was once the site of Galerie Bernheim-Jeune, which closed in 2019 after more than a century in business. The gallery held Van Gogh’s first retrospective and once employed famed art critic Félix Fénéon.

Mario Tavella, president of Sotheby’s France and chairman of Sotheby’s Europe, said the move “underscores our commitment to France and highlights the growing importance of the French art and luxury markets to our company.”

The building will feature restored Art Deco elements, modern amenities, and sustainable lighting, and will be accessible to people with reduced mobility. Access to both exhibitions and auctions will be free to the public. According to the house’s announcement, there will be more than 15 miles of cable installed in the new space to ensure the house’s “digital prowess” and global connectivity.

Paris’s reputation as a European art market hub has grown considerably in recent years, with galleries and art fairs, including the recently rechristened Art Basel Paris, moving to the French capital. 

But with the 2024 Summer Olympics on the horizon, the Louvre is embracing the atmosphere and has announced it will host dance, yoga, and workout classes in the galleries while surrounded works of art, according to the Guardian.

The program, called “Run in the Louvre”, launched on Wednesday with visitors enjoying 10-minute sessions including yoga in the museum’s Cour Marly, which is filled with French sculptures from King Louis XIV’s chateau in Marly.

“The Louvre is physically in the center of Paris. It will be physically at the center of the Olympic Games,” the Louvre’s director Laurence des Cars said.

The Louvre is not the only cultural landmark in the City of Lights that will take part in the Olympic spirit. A temporary stadium built on the Place de la Concorde will host the skateboarding and breakdancing events, the Musee d’Orsay will host Olympic-related sports and cultural activities, and the opening ceremony will take place on the Seine, which runs right past the Louvre.

The 2024 Olympics will be the first in Paris this century and will run from July 26  through August 11, followed by the Paralympics from August 28 to  September 8.

“The scene there just seems to be expanding so much,” Heather Hubbs, NADA executive director, told ARTnews. “The board and I have talked about for a long time, as you know, expanding the fairs to outside the United States, and there’s been a lot of conversations about where to go.”

Hubbs said NADA had considered launching in Europe, Asia, or Latin America, and had polled the group’s membership, with Paris being favored among the top cities where dealers would like to launch a new fair. A previous NADA partnership on the Collaborations section of the German fair Art Cologne, from 2013 to 2016, was also part of the decision-making, as it brought NADA a “kind of exposure in Europe [that] was really good for the organization.”

NADA currently hosts two US fairs, in Miami and New York, which returned in 2023 after a hiatus beginning in 2018. The Paris fair, which will be by invitation, will be much smaller than those two, with an estimated 50 galleries expected to participate, compared to the 130 or so in Miami and the nearly 100 in New York. Bringing together a mix of exhibitors from the networks of both NADA and the Community, the new fair also plans to eschew the typical layout that features false walls and roomy aisles.

“The nature of partnering with another group on an event like this is not something that we’ve done in this way before, and The Community has a sort of ethos of their own which is DIY and punk rock,” Hubbs said.

The Community, a multidisciplinary art institution established in 2016, has a physical space in the Parisian suburb of Pantin; it has mounted exhibitions around the city for the likes of Tom of Finland and Tove Jansson, and previously hosted two editions of an alternative fair, Salon de Normandy, in 2019 and 2020. (This past October, during Paris+, NADA hosted a party as a soft launch for their collaboration.)

“NADA and The Community are very synergistic, and I think we’re going to build something really cool together, which will be a little bit different than Paris International and, obviously, Paris+,” Hubbs said. “There were a lot of things that kind of came together at the right moment that just felt good.”

The operator, Société d’Exploitation de la Tour Eiffel (SETE), announced that an agreement had been reached with unions to address grievances and establish ongoing monitoring of the company’s business model and investments. Despite the resolution, the strike resulted in significant financial setbacks, with revenue losses estimated between €1 and €2 million, or approximately $1.1 to $2.2 million, according to Le Figaro.

The second in three months, the strike underscored deep-seated concerns among employees regarding the tower’s management and long-term financial sustainability. Union representatives warned of a looming crisis, pointing to what they perceive as an overestimation of future ticket revenues and underestimation of maintenance costs.

Stéphane Dieu, a representative of the CGT union, criticized SETE in an interview with The Guardian for prioritizing short-term profitability over essential maintenance and repair needs, while Denis Vavassori, another CGT member and longtime employee of the attraction, described the tower’s current state as unprecedented in his 21-year tenure: I’ve never seen it in such a state,” he said. “The more time goes by, the bigger the repairs will need to be.”

Concerns about the tower’s deteriorating condition were exacerbated by reports of widespread rust and corrosion, prompting calls for urgent action to address structural integrity and warnings that delays in maintenance could lead to more extensive and costly future repairs.

Despite assurances from experts that the tower remains safe, recent reports have highlighted areas of concern, particularly regarding the ongoing repainting campaign. Delays in the project, compounded by the challenges of the pandemic and lead contamination in previous coatings, have raised questions about the effectiveness of maintenance efforts.

SETE expressed regret over the inconvenience caused to visitors and pledged full refunds for affected ticket holders. The company also emphasized its commitment to addressing the concerns raised by employees and ensuring the long-term viability of one of Paris’s most iconic landmarks.

The strike’s resolution coincides with ongoing discussions between SETE and Paris city hall regarding future investments and revenue-sharing arrangements. A proposed amendment to the contract between SETE and the city includes plans to increase entrance fees, allocate additional funds for maintenance work, and restore financial balance by 2025.

As the Eiffel Tower seeks to navigate the challenges posed by the strike and chart a path forward, stakeholders remain focused on preserving the tower’s cultural significance and ensuring its continued prominence on the Parisian skyline.

The shutdown took place on the centenary of the death of Gustave Eiffel, the French engineer whose company designed and built the tower for the 1889 Universal Exposition in Paris. The landmark is expected to play a large role in the 2024 Summer Olympics.

Staff at the Eiffel Tower declared a strike ahead of contract negotiations with the Paris municipal government, which owns the landmark, according to the news outlet France24.

The tower can receive up to 20,000 visitors per day, a spokesperson told France24. According to the leaders of the General Confederation of Labour, France’s second largest labor union, the Tower’s management company, SETE, has put in place an “unsustainable” business model that is far “too ambitious” and overly optimistic of revenue from future ticket sales while grossly underestimating the cost of maintenance and repairs, according The Guardian.

The union claims SETE has based the budget on the Eiffel Tower drawing 7.4 million visitors per year, a figure the landmark has never achieved. Before the Covid-19 pandemic, just under seven million people visited the Tower at its peak; since, the visitor total has failed to top six million. 

Visitors are still able to visit the glass esplanade below the tower and, according to The New York Times, the tower is slated to reopen sometime on Thursday. The Eiffel Tower, typically open 365 days a year, was last closed in March when many landmark sites shut during strikes related to a hike in the country’s retirement age.

More importantly, some say that trying to measure one city’s importance against another may no longer be relevant.

“You have to remember, in London, like in New York or Hong Kong, the primary market is very international,” art dealer Thaddaeus Ropac told ARTnews. “It’s really driven by collectors’ interest.” Access to the primary market, Ropac said, is a privilege that even the wealthiest collectors have to work for. They have to build relationships with dealers and artists in order to make the years-long waitlists that some artists accrue. “Because of this internationality, it often doesn’t matter where the exhibition might be, or where the collector lives. The city in which you do a show doesn’t necessarily reflect the market there.”

Ropac pointed to his gallery’s current show “Stupor,” by the German artist Daniel Richter. The show, inspired by Hanns Eisler’s song “Nightmare” from Hollywooder Liederbuch, features Richter’s inventive approach to painting the human form. Ropac forsees no problems selling out the show, which opened Tuesday and runs through December 1.

“They will sell because there are collectors who are very interested in his work and a long waitlist. That the show is in London says nothing about London or Paris or anywhere,” he said, adding that often an artist’s preference determines where a show is held or to whom work is sold. Such details make gauging any given city’s market murky at best.

In London, however, Brexit and the new laws and requirements that came with it have thrown some decades-old art dealing businesses for a loop.

“There are definitely challenges in London, especially for older, well-established galleries because the cost of doing business has gone up so much since Brexit,” dealer Phillida Reid told ARTnews. Reid’s eponymous gallery in Bloomsbury, a neighborhood in London’s West End home to the British Museum, is currently exhibiting “The Life Cycle of a Flea,” a show of new works by Prem Sahib. Bloomsbury’s Herald Street is teeming with new galleries and young enterprising dealers, according to Reid, who have brought “a real ripple of positivity” to the city’s scene. New galleries include Union Pacific, Brunette Coleman, and aSquire; Reid opened there last year and well-established gallery Hot Wheels Athens will open in November.

The new galleries opening now have adapted to the post-Covid, post-Brexit environment because that’s all they’ve ever known. Older galleries, however, have struggled with the new rules, dealers said. In a January report, the House of Lords Communications Committee warned that governmental complacency toward the hardships faced by the creative sector had the potential to jeopardize the sector, recommending adjustments to tax policy to alleviate the burden on small and medium enterprises.

The new environment has created the need for workarounds. Stuart Shave of London’s Modern Art gallery is set to open a space in Paris this month and elsewhere, both to expand its footprint in Europe and to ease the difficulties introduced by the pandemic and Brexit. Meanwhile, Robbie Fitzpatrick, formerly of Freedman Fitzpatrick in Los Angeles, Chicago-based dealer Mariane Ibrahim, the Italian galleries Massimo De Carlo and Galleria Continua, and former Hauser & Wirth Asia director Vanessa Guo (along with Jean-Mathieu Martini), have all opened spaces in Paris in recent years. The deluge of exhibition spaces prompted the New York Times Style Magazine to say in 2022 that Paris was at long last recapturing “the energy and excitement” of its illustrious 1920s heyday. 

But the pomp surrounding Paris hasn’t translated into market share, yet. This year’s Art Basel/UBS Art Market Report found that the UK’s share of the market is up slightly from 2022, at 16 percent, compared to 8 percent for France.

“The Parisian renaissance is a positive thing, but it doesn’t automatically affect London,” Ropac said. “Paris may be more fashionable this season, but London still has a critical mass of institutions, museums, and artists who have no intention of moving.”

On the other hand, the UK market had been in decline until 2020, bringing in only $456 million that year, its lowest level since 2009. The market has rebounded since. In 2022, the UK saw a 10 percent growth in revenue compared to 2021, buoyed by strong sales at auction, the most impressive of which was Magritte’s L’Empire des Lumières (1961), which sold for $79.7 million at Sotheby’s, marking a new record for the artist’s work.

“Of course with the launch of Art Basel’s Paris+ last year and major international galleries establishing outposts in Paris, there is a lot of momentum in that market, primarily though from the gallery sector,” Drew Watson, who serves as Head of Art Services at Bank of America Private Bank, told ARTnews. The auctions sector, however, according to Watson, remains “still fairly small and focused on niche properties collected by French collectors.”

While Watson sees Paris as a growth market and New York still in the top position and growing, he expects London to simply tread water, given the downward trajectory of the pound sterling and its current high inflation rate.

50 graves were found at the site, which was once the Roman town Lutetia, home to Gallic Parisii tribe. Lutetia’s cemetery, known as the Saint-Jacques necropolis, was first discovered during excavations in the 19th century and first used between the first and third centuries. 

According to El Pais, archaeologists at the time were concerned more with objects of value and ignored the skeletons they found, despite the information about ancient Paris that could be obtained from the people and objects buried there. The gravesite was ultimately forgotten about.

“What’s so exceptional about this is that we have a window into our past, which is quite rare in this city,” Dominique Garcia, president of France’s National Institute of Preventive Archaeological Research (INRAP), told the French broadcaster Europe 1. “Drawing on their funeral rites, we can reach a kind of general vision of the people who lived in Paris in the second century,” he added.

The skeletons, which included men, women, and children, were found in wooden coffins that had been burned, as was the Parisii’s custom. As such, only small bits of wood and metal nails were left behind apart from the skeletons. About half the graves, INRAP said, had small objects with them including ceramic and glass cups and jugs were, the remains of bits of clothing like pins, belts or traces of shoes. Some skeletons had a coin placed in their mouths of in the coffin, likely an offering to the god Charon who would ferry the dead to the underworld.

An offering pit was also found, with the complete skeleton of a pig, an additional small animal, and two large ceramic containers likely “aimed at ensuring the deceased’s survival in the afterlife,” El Pais said.

Scientists hope that the discovery will not only shed light on the lives of the Parisii but also but provide material for DNA testing from which they can learn more about the health of the ancient Parisians.

However, the auction house told ARTnews it plans to move ahead with the sale, adding that the Mexican state’s requests for restitution are “often unsuccessful because they are based on unfounded facts.”

“The sale of all the objects is maintained because all lots have an irreproachable origin and answer perfectly to the criteria fixed by UNESCO’s convention ratified by Mexico and France,” a spokesperson told ARTnews.“France is today one of the most rigorous countries in terms of laws governing the art market and the traceability of the provenance of objects and the Millon auction house, founded in 1928, is the guarantor of the law.”

According to a joint statement by the Ministry of Culture of the Government of Mexico and the National Institute of Anthropology and History (INAH) an official complaint has been filed against Millon and letters have been sent to the Legal Consultancy of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Director General of International Police Affairs, and Interpol in an attempt to repatriate the works in question. 

Additionally, Mexico’s Secretary of Culture, Alejandra Frausto Guerrero, has urged the auction house to consider “ethics and respect for cultural heritage” and consider “the historical, symbolic and cultural value” of the works up for sale and repatriate them to Mexico.

The auction house, evidently, was unmoved by her appeals.

“Pre-Columbian art is a global cultural beacon,” Million’s president, Alexandre Millon, told ARTnews. “Its influence should never be hindered by political obscurantism.”

Million called the effort to repatriate the works “nationalist opportunism,” and added that “revisiting the past and history in order to reclaim them through the pretext of Art is cultural nonsense.”

The Mexican Ministry of Culture has been very active in repatriating cultural artifacts and despite Millon’s comments, a number of Mexico’s requests for repatriation have been fulfilled. Earlier this month, the ministry appealed to over 100 galleries and auction houses across Europe to halt the sale of cultural goods, with one Vienna-based gallery, Galerie Zacke, agreeing to repatriate a representation of the Aztec earth god Tlaltecuhtli.

Last summer the Mexican government received 34 pre-Columbian artifacts that had been owned by an unidentified German couple and in December, 223 artifacts were repatriated to Mexico from the Netherlands. 

Since his election in 2018, Mexican president Andres Manual Lopez has actively fought for the repatriation of Mexican cultural good from across the globe with the social media campaign #MiPatrimonioNoSeVende (#My heritage is not for sale).

The study focuses on Monet and the British painter Joseph Mallord William Turner, both of whom were active during the Industrial Revolution, which saw steam engines and coal-powered manufacturing plants emit unprecedented amounts of smoke and soot into the air.

A group of researchers studied over 100 paintings by Turner and Monet trying to find empirical evidence that the dreamlike haze that has become a hallmark of Impressionist painting was in fact the artists interpretation of the polluted skies of London and Paris, the cities that both Turner and Monet found most inspiring.

“I work on air pollution and while seeing Turner, Whistler and Monet paintings at Tate in London and Musée d’Orsay in Paris, I noticed stylistic transformations in their works,” Anna Lea Albright, a postdoctoral researcher for Le Laboratoire de Météorologie Dynamique at Sorbonne University in Paris and coauthor of the study told CNN. “The contours of their paintings became hazier, the palette appeared wider, and the style changed from more figurative to more impressionistic: Those changes accord with physical expectations of how air pollution influences light.”

According to Albright, air pollution “makes objects appear hazier,” blurs their edges, and because pollution “reflects visible light of all wavelengths,” makes a scene appear whiter. The researchers studied both the hardness of edges and the amount of white in the paintings and compared them those metrics with estimates of air pollution at the time the paintings were executed, between 1796 and 1901.

“We found that there was a surprisingly good match,” Albright told CNN.

The study points out that there is a correlation that goes “beyond artistic evolution and style” because the paintings reflect the differences in the amount of air pollution in London and Paris, which were industrialized at different times. Further proof comes from Monet himself, who in 1901 wrote to his wife, bemoaning a day of bad weather and a lack of the smoke, trains, and boats that “excite the inspiration a little.”

“Turner and Monet are both artists who had to go to places to see certain conditions,” Jonathan Ribner, a professor of European art at Boston University, told CNN. Ribner described a phenomenon he calls “fog tourism” that brought French painters like Monet to London “deliberately to see the fog, because they loved the atmospheric effects.” Ribner was one of the first art histories to theorize that air pollution was an influence on both Monet and Turner.

Despite the evidence, there are some who refuse to believe that the birth of Impressionism can be pegged to ash and soot filling the skies. In the Washington Post, art critic Sebastian Smee railed against the study’s premise that pollution and not creativity explained the two artists’s “stylistic evolution.”

“I’m not arguing that there is no credence to the already well-established idea that Monet was responding to an increasingly polluted environment,” Smee wrote, “I’m just arguing that this latest study’s way of making the case is so full of holes that it strikes me as worthless.”

The mural, which depicts a figure in a bathrobe sporting hair curlers, a fire extinguisher, and a gas mask, appeared on a building that Ukrainian officials said was shelled by Russian troops.

It is one of seven works that Banksy painted around the bombed-out buildings of Ukraine in November. Other murals feature a small boy throwing a grown man to the ground during a martial arts match, a bearded man scrubbing his back in the bath, and two gymnasts. The murals were first revealed to the public via Banky’s Instagram account.

“A group of people tried to steal a Banksy mural. They cut out the work from the wall of a house destroyed by the Russians,” Kyiv’s governor, Oleksiy Kuleba, said in a post on Telegram, according to multiple news outlets.

“Several people were detained on the spot,” he added. “The image is in good condition and in the hands of the authorities.”

The British artist’s mural work has been targeted in the past. In 2019, a gang of thieves cut out a Banksy mural painted on an emergency exit door of the Bataclan theater in Paris. The mural, showing a veiled woman in mourning, was created in 2018 as a memorial to the 139 people who were killed in the 2015 terrorist attacks on the French capital city. Eight people were arrested. They stood trial, and were found guilty of the theft.