The French fashion tycoon Pierre Berge, the business brains behind the Yves Saint Laurent empire, a major philanthropist and a leading figure in the fight against AIDS, died on Friday aged 86. Berge, the longtime partner of the late designer Yves Saint Laurent, died in his sleep at his country home at Saint-Remy-de-Provence in southern France, his foundation said. It added that Berge would be cremated on Tuesday in a private ceremony, and a “public commemoration in his honour” would be held at a later date. The couple — Berge the hard-headed foil to Saint Laurent’s mercurial genius — turned the fashion world on its head when they set up their own label in 1961 after the fragile designer had fallen foul of Dior.

A wall created from 1,600 handmade Mexican bricks appeared in New York’s Washington Square Park on Thursday — only for it to be torn down a few hours later. Mexican artist Bosco Sodi, 46, says he decided to build a wall destined for destruction in January, when President Donald Trump arrived in the White House. In light of Trump’s promise to build a wall along the US-Mexican border, Sodi set out to demonstrate “how when people come together, they can destroy any wall, be it mental, political, psychological or physical.” New York-based Sodi explained he came up with the idea while making bricks with local craftsmen in Oaxaca, Mexico, who told him about their experiences of illegal immigration to the United States.

The Louvre Abu Dhabi will finally open to the public on November 11, a decade after the project was launched, France’s culture minister said Wednesday. “It is my pleasure to announce that the Louvre Abu Dhabi will open its doors on November 11,” Francoise Nyssen said at a news conference in Abu Dhabi. “At a time when culture is under attack… this is our joint response.” The Louvre Abu Dhabi is the first establishment outside of the original Louvre in Paris — which houses the world’s largest collection of art — to carry the famed French name. The museum aims to attract people from neighbouring Arab countries and around the world, according to the UAE culture minister. “Just as the Louvre is the crown jewel of Paris, so the Louvre Abu Dhabi is destined for such distinction,” said Sheikh Nahyan bin Mubarak al-Nahyan.

For the first time in Israel, the Tel Aviv Museum of Art is presenting a comprehensive solo exhibition dedicated to groundbreaking French-American artist Louise Bourgeois (1911–2010), one of the most brilliant, prominent, and influential women in 20th-century art. The exhibition explores the duality in Bourgeois’s concepts and forms; the dialogues between inside and outside, conscious and unconscious, male and female, the body and architecture, passive and active. Bourgeois, who passed away at the age of 98, left a fascinating body of work combining sexuality and psychoanalysis, which greatly contributed to the development of Feminist theory. Her artistic career spanned seven decades, but it was not until 1982, when Bourgeois, by then 71-years old, became the first woman artist to be given a large-scale sculpture retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, that she got her big break and gained wide recognition.