The White House’s recent push to reshape President Donald Trump’s image at the National Portrait Gallery raises questions about who gets to write history and who gets to erase it. A series of interactions between the current administration and this particular Smithsonian institution during the past year has made clear the extent to which Trump is invested in curating his own national story.
February 2026 Art News
In October 1900, a 19-year-old Picasso first arrived in Paris to visit the World’s Fair while simultaneously navigating the road to recognition in the city’s art scene. His first sale—three small canvases depicting bull-fights—sold for just 100 francs to Berthe Weill, an up-and-coming gallerist. Before long, Weill had sold the trio, with a profit of 50 francs, to publisher Adolphe Brisson.
“When I hit a beautiful porcelain vase with a baseball bat, I provoke a visual shock. There is a contrast between the beauty and luxury of the objects and the violence that is submitted to. I want to make people conscious of the fragility of our world.”— Laurent Craste
Tavares Strachan approaches art the way he thinks about music—fluid, improvisational, and open to interpretation. “Because I grew up listening to so much music, I just love the idea that it frees you up,” he said in an interview at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA). “It doesn’t put this constraint on what you’re looking at. It empowers you in a way that visual art doesn’t.”
Ironically, the most iconic portrait of the president was never completed.
June Kelly Gallery will present a memorial exhibition for the painter Sandra Lerner, who passed away in November 2025, opening Friday, February 6, 2026.
The Persian Gulf is witnessing unprecedented art fair expansions as major players like Art Basel and Frieze compete for dominance outside slower American and European markets. Despite the Middle East’s reputation for a thin collector base, vast individual wealth and recent government investments in art are drawing auction houses and dealers to the region.
Soulis Fine Art Auctions, a regional powerhouse near Kansas City, Missouri, will present their 20th annual winter sale as a two-day event on February 21 and 22, 2026.
This past February, the Art Institute of Chicago became the recipient of a transformational gift, approximately 2,250 works of French art spanning the 16th through 19th centuries, said to be the largest holding of its kind in the United States. The donors were collectors Jeffrey Horvitz, a private investor, and his wife, Carol, a trustee of the Art Institute.
“The Smithsonian is not going to show somebody like me right now — specifically me,” Catherine Opie says in a recent Teams interview from Los Angeles, her voice matter-of-fact. “I’m not welcome right now in America.”
