The Louvre Robbed, the 2026 Color of the Year, and Yet More Yattering About Race

Plus, an update on the TEFAF art fair, and a rare Tudor gold bauble found by a metal detector

F leeting as it is, October’s packed with art news.

Ostie de sacrament, which, I learned while dating a guy from Montreal in the 1990s, means, literally, “sacramental host,” but our translation would be WTF, and WTF indeed. The Louvre has been robbed. On October 19, a Sunday, at 9:30 in the morning, thieves stole jewelry with French royal connections, all Napoleonic, using a truck-mounted mechanical lift to reach a second-floor window of the Gallery of Apollo, a little-visited space facing the Seine. Four minutes later and, poof — or I guess the French would say, “Et hop, disparu!” — the crooks and what the Louvre says are $100 million in baubles were gone. Among them are an emerald-and-diamond necklace made for Empress Marie Louise, Napoleon’s second wife, as a wedding present in 1810, and high-end bling made for Empress Eugénie, Napoleon III’s consort, and Queen Marie Amélie, wife of Louis Philippe I.

Some perspective. The theft was brazen indeed, but the Louvre is porous. It was built as a palace, not a museum, and at nearly 800,000 square feet, it’s the biggest art museum in the world. Everyone knows it needs a renovation, which means replacing all of its systems, among them its security technology. A €1.5 billion ($1.75 billion) project is planned, but France is en désordre partout. That’s a heapin’ big mess. The theft will accelerate the project. European museum security is very spotty, far better than it once was, but, still, the Green Vault theft in Dresden in 2015, only a few years ago, involved more than a billion dollars in jewels. The British Museum was robbed more recently, an inside job and an outrageous cover-up.

And I wouldn’t call what went missing from the Louvre the Crown Jewels. Nearly all the Ancien Régime royal regalia was swiped, hocked, and hacked by the Jacobins. What was stolen from the Louvre was, mostly, a cross between official regalia and personal adornments worn by royals from a time when the French monarchy was powered by fumes.

Was the Louvre heist an inside job? Who knows? Security cameras were pointed away from the jewel cases. Simple country soul I might be, but most of the Louvre galleries I like are often empty. The guards, I suspect, have French work habits. The Gallery of Apollo is on one of the riverside quais, with a whopping big window. I don’t know whether the French have a term for “sitting duck” but these diamonds, emeralds, and pearls were easy targets. The French police speedily arrested two suspects. France, for all its many faults, has a first-rate police system and a well-honed surveillance and intelligence system befitting a country that is, after all, unstable. I think I will live to see a Sixth Republic and possibly an Islamic Republic. One suspect was headed to Algeria, another to Mali. Note they weren’t headed to Mayberry R.F.D. With willy-nilly immigration comes third-world crime syndicates.

Audacious as the theft was, the crooks left enough DNA to fill Francis Crick’s Mercedes station wagon. And they dropped Empress Eugénie’s crown, made not for her coronation but for her to wear at the 1855 world’s fair in Paris. Very sloppy. It’s easy to be a daredevil. It’s hard to be deft, as Eugénie’s husband, Napoleon III, learned in 1870. He was France’s last monarch and dumped after the disastrous Franco-Prussian War. Unlike Britain’s Crown Jewels, these aren’t jewels to arouse patriotism. I like France, but “La Marseillaise” didn’t swell in my breast when I read about the robbery.

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Speaking of the Louvre, Funny Face, one of my favorite movies, comes to mind. It’s from 1957, directed by Stanley Donen and starring Fred Astaire, Audrey Hepburn, and Kay Thompson, the savant who wrote the Eloise books and who also was a New York cabaret performer and a vocal coach in Hollywood. In the movie, she played the editor of a top New York fashion magazine — a ’50s Anna Wintour. As the plot unwinds, she, Fred, and Audrey land in Paris, where Audrey’s character, an ugly-duckling American beatnik, turns fashion model and fabulously struts the Louvre staircase descending from the Nike of Samothrace, dressed in Givenchy. No one’s going to steal Nike. Too heavy and, unlike gems, it can’t be cut to pieces.

Thompson’s big number, “Think Pink,” plumbs high commercial fashion’s colors of the year. Red, blue, green, plum, puce, and chartreuse, black, and rust — all out-of-date, she sings. “Banish the beige.” Hallelujah. Pink is what she touts, a girl’s color, but it’s 1957. The tune’s very fun, and Thompson was an American original. Colors come and go but the Color of the Year in 2026, Benjamin Moore & Co. tells us, is Silhouette AF-655. I’d call it burnt umber or charcoal brown. Interior designers follow such things, but I do, too, since I’m an art historian. Benjamin Moore, in business since 1883, is among the world’s great color connoisseurs. Its designers think about color as a cultural statement. Brown is the color of soil, of earth; and, goodness knows, a lack of groundedness is a plague. “Why, land is the only thing worth workin’ for, worth fightin’ for, worth dyin’ for,” Scarlett O’Hara’s father tells her, “because it’s the only thing that lasts.”

Benjamin’s Moore’s Silhouette is the color of chocolate, too, which soothes and treats, and it looks sultry. Dark, saturated colors suggest that a mystery is in the works. The company tells me that a growing taste for bespoke suiting influenced its choice. Not that I wear suits anymore, but brown suits seem too California for me.

I’ve followed Benjamin Moore’s choice of marquee color for years. They’ve been airy, light, and risk-averse for a while — pale blue, lemon sorbet, soft green, off-white. And then they went crazy — caliente red and aubergine — during the first Trump term. They went pale and conformist during the Covid mass hysteria and have deepened the colors since then. Blue Nova, Raspberry Blush, Cinnamon Slate, and, now, Silhouette — the colors for the past four years — point to a will to cocoon. They’re risky colors, too. They’re not bland. It’s no accident that they descend from the Gilded Age palette. People are probably afraid of making a mistake when they select wall colors for their homes, so they go beige, an earnest but humdrum color. Go with your dreams. It’s only paint.

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Staying across the Pond: Two weeks ago the British Museum announced a £3.5 million ($4.6 million) campaign to buy what it calls the Tudor Heart, a heart-shaped, 24-carat gold pendant made, we think, in 1518 to mark the betrothal of the daughter of Henry VIII and Catherine of Aragon. Their daughter, Mary — the future Bloody Mary — was to wed François, the French dauphin. Mary was only two, as in the terrible twos and a toddler, while François, son of Francois I, the French king, was a few months old. The marriage never happened. The groom-to-be died. Mary wed Philip II, the king of Spain, and misruled Britain from 1553 to 1558.

Charlie Clarke, a 34-year-old metal detectorist, a hobbyist, found the pendant in 2019 in a field in Warwickshire, near Birmingham. Once a lost treasure like this is discovered, it becomes the property of the Crown, which oversees its sale. The money is to be split between Clarke and the landowner. British law gives first dibs to a museum or public collection in the U.K. that can raise the fair-market value. The pendant is on view at the British Museum until next year. The Julia Rausing Trust tossed £500,000 ($664,000) into the pot. I knew Julia when she was a secretary at Christie’s in the 1990s. She died last year. She was very fun and chronically broke when I met her, but she married a Swedish billionaire. She’d approve of the gift, knowing, as she did, how fickle love and marriage can be.

The Tudor Heart as a work of art? The value is in its rarity rather than its craftsmanship and innovation. Tudor-era baubles aren’t a farthing a dozen. The British Museum tells us there’s nothing like it, in part because gold is fungible and was, in those days, a store of value to be melted when the need for cash was acute. I’ve only seen photographs of it. It’s on the naïve end of things. Tudor goldsmithing wasn’t well developed. It’s got the Tudor rose and Catherine’s personal emblem, the pomegranate, borrowed from her parents, Ferdinand and Isabella, and signaling her hopes for a big Tudor brood. An embossed banner reads Tousiours, Old French for “always,” but Henry’s and Catherine’s marriage was less than always. It hangs from a gold link chain attached by a clasp shaped as a hand emerging from a cloud. The letters H and K, presumably for Henry and Katherine, are joined by a cord. It weighs 10.58 ounces. I hope the British Museum raises the money to buy it.

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I don’t think I ever met Kim Sajet, who defenestrated herself this past summer as director of the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery after President Trump seemed to fire her. She wasn’t a bad director. Rather, she was an agenda director — race and gender were her big causes — and a predictable, formulaic one. With one foot out the door, she nabbed a new job, as director of the Milwaukee Art Museum. I’m not sure the trustees made a good choice, though I have no idea who else applied. She’s damaged goods. Why not hire a fresh face with new thinking and energy? Why not hire someone who is focused on art?

My spies tell me she led a session at the Association of Art Museum Directors earlier this month. That’s the premier, prestige trade association for museum directors in the U.S., Canada, and Mexico. I was a member for years. Sajet moderated the keynote address by the artist Titus Kaphar, a good artist who specializes in race-baiting, as does Sajet. It was called “Making Space for Black History: Amending the Landscape of American Art” and opened with one of my pet atrocities: the removal of the equestrian sculpture of Theodore Roosevelt from the front of the Museum of Natural History. “In statue form, Roosevelt rides a horse and boldly stares into the future; meanwhile, nameless African American and Indigenous people walk on foot beside him.” For this, the bronze, a very good work of art, was removed. Roosevelt, a former U.S. president and founder of the museum, a fierce advocate for racial equality, was high up, leading and protecting. Kaphar likens him to Confederate generals. Sajet, I’m sure, nodded her head.

Why is she doing this? If I were a trustee at the Milwaukee Art Museum, I’d suggest to Sajet that she lay low, devote her time to learning about the collection and, especially, the good people in Milwaukee and its suburbs. The museum needs a director, planner, networker, friend raiser, tastemaker, and soothing presence, from what I’ve heard. It doesn’t need a heroine.

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TEFAF, the European Fine Arts Foundation, sponsors the annual, grand art fair in Maastricht in the Netherlands. I cover it every year since the dealers there display the top of the top, mostly Old Masters and early into the 20th century. Sometimes things sell on the spot. Lots of museums buy there, too, so sales are deferred as trustees speak and money is raised. Even private buyers take time. I’ve discovered that the older I get, the less time I feel I have but the less impulsive I’ve become.

I love visiting the fair every March but, six months later, get a better bead on what sold. The Art Institute of Chicago bought Léon Spilliaert’s self-portrait from 1907 from David Lévy, the dealer based in Brussels. It’s a self-portrait with pizzazz. Salomon Lilian, based in Amsterdam, sold The Virgin at Prayer, by Michael Sweerts from the late 1650s to a Dutch foundation for £3.5 million ($4.6 million), more or less. It’s a picture within a picture and also a self-portrait since Sweerts depicts himself holding the painting of Mary.

Stuart Lochhead Sculpture, a London dealer, sold Joseph Chinard’s Athénienne terra-cotta sculpture to the Met. Chinard was Paris’s great Revolutionary-era sculptor. The Clark Art Institute, where I served as a curator for years, bought a superb seascape by Félix Vallotton from 1902. It bought it from Agnew’s. The Clark hasn’t bought much in the last few years. TEFAF mainstays like David Tunick and Aronson Antiquaires, the Delftware dealer based in Amsterdam, sold plenty as well.

TEFAF was a big success, as it should be. Everything’s museum quality. For art lovers, it’s a must-visit experience.

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I’ll be on the road for the next two weeks, in part for the Buckley Prize Dinner, but I’ll report on the arts from Sarasota, St. Petersburg, Palm Beach, singe spots in Los Angeles, and San Juan Capistrano, ending with William Blake at the British Art Center in New Haven.