Belgium’s Africa Museum reopened on Saturday after a five-year restoration to repackage its looted treasures with a critical view of the country’s brutal colonial past. Deputy Prime Minister Alexander De Croo hailed a “historic moment” and said it would open “a new chapter” in Belgian-African relations. The reopening of the former Royal Museum for Central Africa in the Tervuren Palace outside Brussels comes amid a renewed European debate about returning stolen artefacts. Last month, French President Emmanuel Macron agreed to return 26 cultural artefacts to Benin “without delay”, a move likely to put pressure on other former colonial powers to return African artworks to their countries of origin. Macron said the decision should not be seen as an isolated or symbolic case and proposed a conference in Paris next year to discuss an “exchange policy” for African treasures. “Restitution should no longer be tab

An exhibition of artwork by the world-renowned father of the Op Art movement, Victor Vasarely, opened at the Leigh Yawkey Woodson Art Museum on Saturday, December 1. “Victor Vasarely: Op Art Master,” an exhibition from the collection of Herakleidon Museum in Athens, Greece, comprises more than 150 serigraphs, lithographs, and gouache paintings – designed to engage the mind and eye. Vasarely’s bold monochromatic and vividly colorful, geometric artworks often seem to swell, recede, undulate, and pulsate. To create this optical trickery – illusions of mass and motion that appear to emanate from his two-dimensional artwork – Vasarely experimented with color, background, geometric combinations, and materials as he sought contrast, distorted grids, and played with perspective. Vasarely’s innovative use of optical illusions became popular in the 1960s and 70s, when Op Art extended into everyday life via des

The volatile political climate in the United States reverberates at Art Basel, the international art fair held in December in Miami Beach, with some artists portraying a country on the “verge of chaos,” populated by “phantasmagoric” minorities. Miami Beach, a barrier island facing Miami, is celebrated for its beaches and its unbridled party atmosphere. Young tourists can be seen “twerking” on the roofs of their rented cars, and on long weekends a drunken mass of humanity often spills into the streets, in unruly scenes punctuated by gunfire and police checks. But during “art week,” which is held every year during the first week of December, flip-flops are replaced with designer clothes, beer with champagne, and suddenly the slender island is populated by a horde of trend-setting art lovers and dealers from around the world. In this dressed-up version