Photographer and filmmaker Tyler Mitchell has won the 2026 Don Tyson Prize for the Advancement of American Art, whose award rises this year to $250,000 and shifts from biennial to annual. Born in Atlanta in 1995, Mitchell became the first Black photographer to shoot an American Vogue cover in 2018, photographing Beyoncé.

Two suits filed in Los Angeles seek the return of Nazi-looted works, including a Cranach the Elder diptych held by Pasadena’s Norton Simon Museum and watercolors an Auschwitz survivor was forced to paint for Josef Mengele. The claims draw on new California and federal laws spurred by the Cassirer family’s two-decade fight over a Pissarro in Madrid.

Peter Max, whose Day-Glo cosmic imagery came to symbolize 1960s counterculture before saturating jumbo jets, postage stamps, and the MTV logo, died September 14 in New York at eighty-eight, having suffered from Alzheimer’s-related dementia. Prolific and unabashedly commercial, he built an empire that kept him at odds with the fine-art world.

A fast-moving cloudburst dumped nearly two inches of rain on Florence on September 17, sending water through a skylight and down the glass case protecting Caravaggio’s Bacchus at the Uffizi. The painting and six nearby canvases were unharmed, but the deluge also flooded galleries at the Palazzo Pitti, months after the complex announced a $58 million renovation.

The Art Institute of Chicago will return Jean Metzinger’s Woman with a Fan (1913) to the heirs of Jewish collector Emanuel Lewenstein, having acquired it in 1959 unaware of its wartime history. Research by the Mondex Corporation found the painting was taken from the family during World War II and sold involuntarily, likely through a notorious Amsterdam auction house in 1940.

Madrid’s Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza will expand into a second building to house more than 360 contemporary works donated or loaned from Francesca Thyssen-Bornemisza’s TBA21 Collection, including pieces by Ai Weiwei and Marina Abramović. Roughly 180 works will pass permanently into public ownership, adding more than $18 million in assets, with the new venue slated for completion around 2031.

Stockholm’s Moderna Museet has appointed the closely watched curator Cédric Fauq to oversee contemporary international art, joining from Bordeaux’s CAPC, where he serves as chief curator. A 2023 Turner Prize juror whose credits include a Rammellzee retrospective, Fauq arrives as the museum builds what its director calls “a new vision” ahead of its next chapter.

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