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The Producers of Art-World Satire ‘The Square’ Apologize to Artist Lola Arias for Using Her Name in the Film Without Her Consent


A 2017 film satirizing the art world is back in the headlines after the production company behind The Square officially issued an apology to Berlin-based Argentinian artist Lola Arias. She is named in the movie, directed by Ruben Östlund, as the creator of the titular artwork, an illuminated outline of a square on a cobblestone courtyard inside which viewers must promise to treat everyone equally.

“We would like to offer an apology to Lola Arias for the way her name was used in the fiction film The Square,” Plattform Produktion said in a statement shared by Deadline.

“We understand that the use of Lola Arias’s name, which was not discussed as clearly as it should have been, created a misunderstanding connecting her work as an artist to the artwork The Square (Rutan),” the statement continued. “After meeting the artist in Berlin and discussing the misperception caused, we would like to emphasize that The Square (Rutan) is an artwork originally created by Ruben Östlund and Kalle Boman for the city of Värnamo, Sweden in 2015. All reference to the artist Lola Arias as the creator of the artwork is fictional.”

In 2017, Arias had filed a lawsuit against the company in Berlin. She claimed the film had caused some people to incorrectly think she created the artwork, or to mistake her for a fictional character.

The artist was originally set to play a minor role in the film, but Arias’s character did not make the final cut. She alleged that Plattform Produktion used her name without her consent.

Starring Claes Bang as a contemporary art curator and Elisabeth Moss as a journalist, the movie won the prestigious Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival in France.

Arias had hoped suing would prevent the movie from being distributed unless it was edited to remove mentions of her name. It remains to be seen if Plattform with follow up its apology with a new, Arias-free edit of the film. As of press time, neither the artist nor the production company had responded to inquiries from Midnight Publishing Group News.

 

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How an Upstart Magazine Grew Into One of This Century’s Best Talent-Spotting Galleries


Every week, Midnight Publishing Group News brings you The Gray Market. The column decodes important stories from the previous week—and offers unparalleled insight into the inner workings of the art industry in the process.

This week, navigating a road seldom traveled…

 

FROM MAGAZINE MASTHEAD TO GALLERY BEACHHEAD

By this point in art-market history, it’s not all that rare to hear the founders of a successful gallery say years after the fact that they never actually intended to open a gallery. What is much rarer, however, is to encounter a successful gallery that began as a separate business entirely. Rarer still—possibly to the level of uniqueness—is for the origin point of a gallery to have been a magazine. 

Yet that has been the trajectory of Loyal gallery, the tastemaking Stockholm-based enterprise celebrating its eighteenth anniversary this year. Loyal’s unusual evolution tells us a lot about what matters most in a business where the standard playbook looks less and less useful by the day. 

Today, in the early spring of 2023, Loyal’s home is a character-drenched former Brazilian embassy in a trendy district of Stockholm. Its neighbors include the current embassies of Estonia, Botswana, and Switzerland; two buildings owned by the Swedish-born mega-producer Max Martin; and a slew of townhomes belonging to some of Sweden’s quieter but no less elite residents.

If you had strictly acquired works by artists from the past 18 years of Loyal programming, you would not only have managed to get out ahead of a few market booms; you would also have managed to do it while looking like you had A-level taste. Some of Loyal’s longest-standing artistic collaborators include present-day stars Katherine Bernhardt and Eddie Martinez, both of whom began working with the gallery in the mid-aughts. Newer discoveries the gallery has teamed up with, including Los Angeles-based Mario Ayala, are well on their way to staking out promising careers.

With more than a hundred exhibitions under its belt post-launch, the gallery opened its first on U.S. soil during this February’s edition of Frieze Los Angeles. That said, Loyal has no plans to build out a globe-spanning megastructure; it also appears to have no plans to slow down.

So, how exactly did this happen? And what can we learn from it?

Installation view of "Lauren Quin: Bat's Belly," at Loyal, Stockholm, June 3–July 17, 2021. Courtesy of Loyal.

Installation view of “Lauren Quin: Bat’s Belly,” at Loyal, Stockholm, June 3–July 17, 2021. Courtesy of Loyal.

FIRST EDITION

Before there was a Loyal gallery, and even before there was a Loyal magazine, there was a band. It started when Martin Lilja, an aspiring math student from the midsize Swedish city of Växjö, moved to London in 1995 with his then-girlfriend, Marilyn Petridean. Together, they aimed to make a mark as a lo-fi pop duo called By Coastal Cafe. During this phase, Lilja met a young photographer and fellow Swede named Kristian Bengtsson. They connected immediately on both personal and creative levels. “We’d edit his photos on coffee breaks,” Lilja said in a Zoom interview earlier this month. 

These exchanges soon fermented into something more potent. In 2000, the trio set out to launch a magazine they dubbed Loyal. At first they had Bengtsson’s documentary photos, Petridean’s drawings, Lilja’s and Bengtsson’s self-taught design skills, and the combined will to create something new. Those turned out to be as many resources as they needed. Which was fortunate, because there weren’t many others available. 

“We didn’t have a computer,” Lilja said. “But there was a free computer at this project for troubled teens nearby. We snuck in and befriended the guy who ran it, and he started letting us in to use it.”

The result synthesized the in-house visual content with writing straddling conceptualism and absurdist humor. One piece from the inaugural issue was an interview with nigh-indestructible Rolling Stone Keith Richards, wholly imagined. “We just did funny things that made us excited,” Lilja said. 

The cofounders printed 1,000 copies of the first magazine issue in Sweden using offset printing and thoughtful layouts. The goal was for Loyal to be sold in places like Magma in London and Spoonbill Books in Williamsburg, Brooklyn—proudly analog-first bookshops that specialized in rooting aesthetics in soft earth. They soon got their wish on a small scale, as they managed to start dropping off 10-packs of new issues on consignment at some of their dream sellers. “We didn’t care so much about the $4 we were making on commission. We just cared that we were there,” said Lilja. 

Between 2000 and 2005, Loyal occurred as two issues annually, good for 10 issues total. Yet both the end product and the behind-the-scenes personnel were in near-constant flux. Lilja eventually moved to join Bengtsson in Stockholm. Petridean moved on from Loyal after the second issue. Then, in 2001 Lilja met Amy Giunta, a native New Yorker visiting Stockholm for the summer. She soon became a key part of Loyal’s development on multiple levels: first, by biking copies of Loyal #3 to specialty bookshops in Manhattan upon her return from Sweden; then as a contributor to the magazine’s fourth issue; and soon after, as a key member of its brain trust forevermore. (She moved to Sweden in December 2002 and married Lilja in 2004.)

Installation view of "Eddie Martinez: New Paintings 2," at Loyal, Stockholm, March 20–May 15, 2021. Courtesy of Loyal.

Installation view of “Eddie Martinez: New Paintings 2,” at Loyal, Stockholm, March 20–May 15, 2021. Courtesy of Loyal.

The contents of Loyal evolved, moving beyond intuitive experimentation and, in Lilja’s words, “became more and more ‘art’ over time,” largely because of the magazine’s growing profile among a certain tranche of emerging artists in the early 2000s. Notable contributors included an international array of artists and members of the independent music and literary scenes: David Shrigley, Graham Coxon (of Brit-pop legends Blur), Daniel Johnston, Rita Ackermann, Will “Bonnie Prince Billy” Oldham, Billy Childish, and even the now-infamous JT LeRoy showed up in some form on its pages.

“We had one foot in the art world, or only a little toe. But some artists knew of us through that,” Lilja said. “These were artists who weren’t fully in the art world at the time. They were peripheral to it, trying to find an opening into it.” 

One representative—and pivotal—early relationship formed by the Loyal squad was with Eddie Martinez. Lilja recalls meeting him through a friend at a pop-up exhibition in New York circa 2003–04. Martinez would have been no older than 27 at the time and, based on his current C.V., he hadn’t yet scored his first solo show at a commercial gallery. But Lilja and company immediately sparked to his riotous, largely self-developed collision of gestural abstraction and wigged-out representational imagery, and soon he was contributing artworks to the magazine.

Loyal’s collaboration with Martinez established a template that played out over and over again in the early years: meet an interesting artist who hadn’t quite pierced the veil of the art establishment; recognize and develop their practice through publishing; then imagine what more could be done together beyond the page. By the end of 2004, the process had repeated itself enough times with enough artistic contributors for Loyal to take the next logical step. 

 

TURNING THE PAGE

In February 2005, Loyal debuted as a gallery in a storefront space in Stockholm, two blocks away from where the last issue of the magazine was produced. 

By the summer, the gallery had staged solo shows of works by polymath Adam Green, a co-founder of Bay Area indie-rock progenitors the Moldy Peaches and an experimental filmmaker whose work would go on to be screened at venues as prestigious as the Fondation Beyeler in Basel; Wes Lang, whose vocabulary of tweaked Americana later won him representation at Almine Rech and space in the collection of MoMA and other top-flight museums; and Martinez, in his first one-person show on a resume that now includes solo shows at galleries as well-known as Blum and Poe, Mitchell-Innes and Nash, and Perrotin, as well as institutions as vaunted as the Drawing Center in New York and the Yuz Museum in Shanghai.

Although the transition from specialty publisher to talent-spotting emerging gallery came with its fair share of anxiety, it was also more natural than it might have appeared from afar. Every issue of Loyal was essentially a curated show in print. A tight budget and the rudimentary state of digital communication in the early 2000s meant that contributing artists were generally shipping physical works to Lilja and Giunta to scan and ship back. Most of all, though, the magazine and the gallery were both ultimately about forming, building, and maintaining relationships with artists who shared a perspective on their work and ambitions to do something bigger than they were otherwise being given the opportunity to do. 

Installation view of "Daniel Heidkamp: Esprit De Corps," at Loyal, Stockholm, June 9–July 8, 2022. Courtesy of Loyal.

Installation view of “Daniel Heidkamp: Esprit De Corps,” at Loyal, Stockholm, June 9–July 8, 2022. Courtesy of Loyal.

Just ask Daniel Heidkamp. Heidkamp, whose solo show at Acquavella’s Palm Beach location is on view through April 9, is best known for color-saturated landscape and architectural paintings of what may be the actual sites represented or reinterpreted in famous works of art history. He remembers attending the launch of the gallery’s first actual book, a catalog for a 2005 group show titled “Loyal and His Band,” at Spoonbill. It would be a few more years before he actually met Lilja and Giunta at an art fair, a few more before they visited his studio, and still a few more until the duo included his work in a 2015 group show. But he stressed that timeline was a matter of circumstance and consideration, not attitude.

“They were some of the few gallerists who would show up to parties and just talk to artists as if there were no hierarchies,” Heidkamp said of Lilja and Giunta by phone from his studio in Brooklyn. “I think they’re definitely down to go to people’s studios who aren’t necessarily the hottest artists of the year, who may not even be known yet. Other galleries can be very pretentious about who they’ll talk to.” 

Heidkamp credits Lilja and Giunta’s willingness to pound the global pavement and give artists a shot for their track record in identifying and helping to coach up so many eventual stars. And yet they are also the opposite of the type of quick-twitch opportunists ready to sign up any potential breakout artist at any ebullient moment in the art-market cycle.

Their relationship with Los Angeles-based figurative painter Michelle Blade reinforces the couple’s willingness to play the long game. She met them while at the California College of Art in San Francisco in 2008. “I was preparing for my thesis show at that time and starting to work with a handful of galleries in the city,” Blade wrote by email. “It wasn’t until last year, in 2022, that they reached back out and came to my studio in L.A. for another visit. It was then that they invited me to do a solo exhibition. The time was right and we all felt it.”

Still, prescience and follow-through only mean so much if a dealer can’t also speak an artist’s language and earn their trust. Heidkamp and Blade agree that Lilja and Giunta bring the whole package.

“It’s their instincts and honesty that I value most in our working relationship. It’s rare to be able to talk so deeply about one’s practice, and I’ve come to consider them both touchstones,” Blade wrote. “I can’t speak to this exactly, but I do feel it relates to how dedicated they are to becoming part of a community.”

No wonder Loyal has (fittingly) managed to keep a core group of artists devoted to the gallery for most of its lifespan, even as some of its longest-standing collaborators become market supernovas. “As a gallery we’re pretty close with the people we show. You can’t get rid of us that easily,” Lilja joked. 

Installation view of "Michelle Blade: The Blue Horse," at Loyal, Stockholm, from April 27–May 28, 2022. Courtesy of Loyal.

Installation view of “Michelle Blade: The Blue Horse,” at Loyal, Stockholm, from April 27–May 28, 2022. Courtesy of Loyal.

BINDING PAST TO PRESENT

While Loyal has never maintained a permanent gallery space outside Sweden, its home has shifted several times over the years. Lilja and Giunta expanded to a second location in Stockholm for a brief period just before the advent of the Great Financial Crisis in 2008. “It was a tough time and you have to be insanely obsessed to make it work as a gallery, and Amy and I were that,” Lilja said. Bengtsson moved on from Loyal in 2009 to devote himself to his career as a commercial photographer and director, leaving Loyal entirely in Lilja and Giunta’s hands. They moved the gallery to Malmö for a time before returning to Stockholm in 2014. Four years later, they leased the former Brazilian embassy that still serves as their headquarters today. 

Their Stockholm reprise isn’t the only way the gallery has come full circle. In 2017, Loyal returned to its publishing roots by committing to produce an in-house exhibition catalog for every new show. Each catalog follows a nearly unchanging design template: identical white paper stock, typeface printed in black, perfect binding bearing the artist’s name and exhibition title, and a text-free cover featuring a full-bleed image of a work in the exhibition.

This confluence of art and publishing has created fertile soil for at least a few other galleries to grow up strong in recent years. Brendan Dugan launched Karma in 2011 as a combination publishing house and exhibition space; the business now encompasses four year-round exhibition spaces in New York and Los Angeles, a seasonal space in Thomaston, Maine, and a standalone bookstore. Harper Levine began as a rare books dealer before the fateful acquisition of a first-rate library of photography books circa 2005 broadened his clientele to include art and photography collectors; today, his namesake business Harper’s counts five gallery spaces across greater New York and Los Angeles, as well as a dedicated bookstore in Chelsea.

That being said, Loyal pre-dated these galleries. It is also the only one that moved from being nothing but a publisher to nothing but a gallery for a time, and the only one that has not embarked on a multi-city bricks-and-mortar expansion. 

Installation view of "Loyal @ El Royale," Loyal's pop-up exhibition at the El Royale Apartments during Frieze Los Angeles 2023, featuring works by (L to R) Hiejin Yoo, Diana Yesenia Alvarado, and Andrea Marie Breiling. Courtesy of Loyal.

Installation view of “Loyal @ El Royale,” Loyal’s pop-up exhibition at the El Royale Apartments during Frieze Los Angeles 2023, featuring works by (L to R) Hiejin Yoo, Diana Yesenia Alvarado, and Andrea Marie Breiling. Courtesy of Loyal.

None of this is to say that Lilja and Giunta are content to stand still, however. During Frieze L.A. 2023, they presented “Loyal @ El Royale,” their first standalone gallery exhibition in the U.S. It was a pop-up on the ground floor of the historic El Royale Apartments in Hancock Park where Giunta and Lilja began renting a second home post-Covid. It featured a blend of early discoveries (such as Blade, Heidkamp, Martinez) alongside first-time collaborators recently ascendant on the international scene (such as Ross Caliendo, Emmanuel Louisnord Desir, and Hiejin Yoo). 

It was also a testament to the strength of Lilja and Giunta’s relationships with talent new and known to the gallery alike. Most of the artists included in the show already had a dealer representing them in L.A. This meant that participating in “Loyal @ El Royale” was something the artists could only do if they were proactive about navigating the waters of territorial gallery rights—not necessarily a contentious process, but always one that requires time, headspace, and a certain level of insistence.

Lilja said that he and Giunta hope to program one or two shows a year in L.A. going forward to complement their six annual shows in Sweden. Temporary exhibitions elsewhere in Europe are also a possibility. But for now, the only sure thing is that the magazine-turned-gallery isn’t inclined to follow expectations of what a space with nearly two decades of experience should do next.

“It feels like the gallery started over a few times,” Lilja said. “So in that sense we still feel like a five-year-old gallery.”

 

That’s all for this week. ‘Til next time, remember: if you don’t like the standard layout, you can always design your own.

 

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Saint Laurent’s Strikingly Modernist and Minimal Vision for Furniture Takes the Spotlight in a Two-Part Exhibition in Los Angeles and Paris


Saint Laurent’s Anthony Vaccarello doesn’t just take the chic and minimal route for his fashions. The “French Modernists” furniture exhibition opens today at the brand’s Paris and Los Angeles Rive Droite outposts, which also serves as galleries and incubators for the creative director’s passions (he regularly stocks them with high-end vintage furniture and artworks he curates, as well as informing the décor of worldwide boutiques).

Jean-Michel Frank's parchment 6-leaf screen. Courtesy of Saint Laurent.

Jean-Michel Frank’s parchment 6-leaf screen. Courtesy of Saint Laurent.

The exhibition, which coincides with this week’s PAD Paris design fair, predominantly showcases the titan of the movement, Jean-Michel Frank (1895-1941). Frank specialized in hyper-luxurious, maximalist style of minimalism. As an interior designer he helmed Elsa Schiaperlli’s Paris apartment and had his work documented by Man Ray. Architectural Digest noted “the rooms of his clients embraced the glitter of Boulle as well as the glamour of the silver screen.”

Frank, who also developed the ubiquitous Parsons table, has been long intertwined with the maison. Its founder Yves Saint Laurent and his life and business partner Pierre Bergé were avid collectors whose interest in the 60s and 70s helped reignite a Frank renaissance. Their benchmark 2009 Christie’s auction featured items such as an exquisite mica veneered low table which went for 319,000 E.

The glamorous austerity of Jean-Michel Frank. Courtesy of Saint Laurent.

The glamorous austerity of Jean-Michel Frank. Courtesy of Saint Laurent.

Vaccarello also selected works by architect and designer Jacques Adnet and the jeweler and smith Jean-Després who wielded hammered metal to play with light and reflection in his works. Saint Laurent collaborated with Galerie Chastel Marécha, Galerie Anne-Sophie Duval, and Galerie Jacques Lacoste. in a statement, the brand touts, “Although designed almost a century ago, the exhibition highlights the striking modernism and contemporaneity of the work of the three designers.”

 

“French Modernists” is on view at Saint Laurent Rive Droite boutiques in Los Angeles and Paris until April 14.

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London Will Honor the Victims of the Transatlantic Slave Trade With a New Memorial in the Docklands


London is planning to unveil the U.K.’s first memorial commemorating the victims of transatlantic slave trade.  The city is aiming to have it ready for the public it in the summer of 2026, according to mayor Sadig Khan.

The memorial was announced ahead of Saturday’s International Day of Remembrance of the Victims of Slavery and the Transatlantic Slave Trade.

The new monument will be located at West India Quay in London Docklands, which has a strong link to the history of the trade.  It will also recognize the role the U.K. capital played in the trade that has impacted “generations of Black communities in London, across Britain and around the world,” Khan noted in a statement on Friday.

The city, which is committing £500,000 ($613,507) to develop the memorial, played a fundamental role in the organization and funding of the trade; in London and elsewhere in the U.K. there are monuments commemorating its abolition, but also statues and buildings that reflect the wealth and power it created. In 2020, a statue of London-based slave trader Robert Milligan was removed and is now in the storage of the Museum of London’s collection.

The Commission for Diversity in the Public Realm set up by Khan will start to develop an artistic brief of the memorial in summer. The artist to design the memorial will be chosen through an open competition.

slave trade london

Municipal workers remove the statue of slave-owner and slave merchant Robert Milligan after a petition in West India Quay district of London, United Kingdom on June 9, 2020. Photo: Hasan Esen/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images)

The memorial fulfills the mayor’s pledge to support a memorial and educational programs related to the trade and the victims. “We do not have a dedicated memorial in our capital to honor the millions of enslaved people who suffered and died as a result of this barbaric practice,” noted Khan.

“It is vital that our public spaces reflect the heritage of our great city—in all its diversity and complexity. This memorial will help commemorate the victims of a dark, yet formative chapter of our history.”

Working in partnership with the Canal & River Trust and the Museum of London Docklands, the new memorial will be located near the museum, which is in the area that is home to warehouses built to receive products of slavery. A number of “satellite sites” will be built across the capital to accompany this new memorial, with an aim to connect different threads of slavery stories.

Debbie Weekes-Bernard, deputy mayor for communities and justice, noted on Friday that the memorial will serve as an opportunity to open up discussion about how this “very dark period of our history is actually a part of London’s story.”

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A Museum Has Located a Missing Figure That Was Cut Out of This 17th-Century Family Portrait


A rare reunion has taken place at the Nivaagaard Collection in Denmark, as the museum has located the image of a woman, who, for nearly 200 years, has been missing from a 17th-century family portrait.

Double Portrait of a Father and Son (1626), painted by Flemish artist Cornelis de Vos in luminous color, sees a resplendent duo in bourgeois garb, the son tenderly clutching his father’s hand. But part of a dress, poking out of the lower right-hand corner of the picture, has long indicated that the painting was missing a figure—quite likely a mother, who had been cropped off at some point.

A research team, put together by the museum to study its Dutch baroque collection, duly set on a hunt for this missing woman last year.

They began with a 1966 conservation report by the National Gallery of Denmark, which provided another vital clue. The volume contained photographs of the painting without its frame following a restoration, revealing part of a woman’s arm, complete with an elaborate cuff. Her hand, with one finger encircled by a pricey ring, held a pair of embroidered gloves lined with red velvet.

An unframed Double Portrait of a Father and Son (1626), with a woman’s hand visible on the right. Photo: The Nivaagaard Collection.

Detail of the woman’s hand holding a pair of embroidered gloves. Photo: Screenshot from Nivaagaard Collection’s short film, The Lost Woman With the Brown Eyes.

“We began our search by looking for matchers among all the sitting women in de Vos’s oeuvre,” said Jørgen Wadum, the museum’s researcher and special consultant. “This turned up dozens of women amongst the archives of RKD [the Netherlands Institute for Art History] and the Getty Research Institute.”

Wadum then did the next logical thing: He googled “Cornelis de Vos portrait of a woman”—and he found her. “It was totally unexpected!” he said.

Cornelis de Vos, Portrait of a Woman (1626), unrestored. Photo: The Nivaagaard Collection.

His search had led him to de Vos’s Portrait of a Woman (1626), an image of which appeared in a 2016 interview with Dutch art dealer Salomon Lilian. In 2014, Lilian had acquired the work at an auction at Christie’s London, and what’s more, had it cleaned and restored.

To the Nivaagaard team, the connections between the two paintings were plain. The elegant lady portrayed in Lilian’s painting wore a millstone collar similar to that of the father in Double Portrait; her brown eyes, too, matched those of the young son’s. The restoration also revealed that the brown background of Portrait of a Woman was merely overpainting; the woman actually stood against a landscape, filled in with some distant poplar trees and heavy clouds.

Cornelis de Vos, Portrait of a Woman (1626), after restoration. Photo: The Nivaagaard Collection.

It was this backdrop that lined up with the one in Double Portrait, making them an undeniable match. “Fortunately, Lilian had had the painting restored,” said Wadum. “Otherwise, we may have missed the link to our double portrait.”

Portrait of a Woman is notably smaller than Double Portrait, its height only less than half of the larger work. Researchers believe the original family portrait may have been severed into two paintings, possibly after sustaining damage, around 1830–1859. Double Portrait was acquired by Danish businessman and Nivaagaard founder, Johannes Hage, in 1907.

The reunited family portrait. Photo: The Nivaagaard Collection

The team is also continuing to source the identity of the family as much as the provenance of the family portrait. They have homed in on the 1802 sale of a painting, titled A Family Picture of Three Portraits of De Vos, in London, a canvas that would reappear at various other auctions in England between 1812 and 1830. At these later sales, the portrait was curiously retitled or described as A Burgomaster, His Wife, and Son by De Vos (burgomaster denotes the mayor of a town)

“Is this merely an interpretation of the auctioneer, or did the lost upper and lower right corners of the canvas contain an inscription?” said researcher Angela Jager. “In any case, the ruling elite is exactly the type of clientele one would expect for a monumental family portrait by the sought-after portrait painter.”

While research is ongoing, the Nivaagaard Collection has acquired Portrait of a Woman with a grant from the New Carlsberg Foundation. The museum will exhibit both portraits as part of its Painting Collection, illustrating what museum director Andrea Rygg Karberg called “a huge scoop for Dutch baroque art history.”

Speaking about the reunited family portrait, he added: “All three of the subjects take on an entirely new dimension, depth, and glow when they are contemplated together as originally intended, rather than in isolation from each other.”

 

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