Lifestyle

This painting is missing. Do you have it?

Published

4 months ago

December 28, 2025

This painting is missing. Do you have it?

The missing 1916 painting Music, by Gabriele Münter. Its whereabouts have been unknown to the public since 1977. Oil on canvas. (Private collection. © 2025 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn)

The Guggenheim, New York

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The Guggenheim, New York

This is a story about a missing painting, from an artist you may never have heard of. Though she helped shape European modern art, German artist Gabriele Münter’s work was quickly overshadowed in the public’s mind by her 12-year relationship with noted abstract artist Wassily Kandinsky.

She met Kandinsky in Munich in 1902, and with his tutoring, she “mastered color as well as the line,” she told a German public broadcaster in 1957. Together with other artists, they founded an avant-garde arts collective called Der Blaue Reiter (The Blue Rider) in 1911.

Wassily Kandinsky’s Painting With White Border (Bild mit weißem Rand), 1913. Oil on canvas, Guggenheim Museum, New York City.

Allison Chipak/The Guggenheim, New York

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Allison Chipak/The Guggenheim, New York

At the time, most modern artists, like Kandinsky, were moving toward more and more abstract work. Not Münter. In her paintings, people look like people and flowers look like flowers. But her dazzling colors, simplified forms and dramatic scenes are startlingly fresh; her domestic scenes are so immediate that they feel like you’ve interrupted a crucial, private moment.

“Gabriele Münter was so pioneering, so adventurous in her adherence to life,” said Megan Fontanella, curator of modern art and provenance at the Guggenheim Museum in New York City. “She is revitalizing the still life, the landscape, the portrait genres, and presenting them in these really fresh and dynamic ways.”

Yet, perhaps due to her relationship with Kandinsky, her work was rarely collected by important museums after her death in 1962 (she herself said she was seen as “an unnecessary side dish” to him), and so her paintings largely disappeared from the public eye.

Now Münter is having a moment, with exhibitions this year in Madrid and Paris, as well as one currently at the Guggenheim in New York. The New York show is an expansive one and includes American street photography in the late 1890s, alongside over 50 paintings, from her dazzlingly colored European landscapes to portraits capturing the expressive faces of people she knew.

Gabriele Münter's "Self-Portrait in Front of an Easel" (Selbstbildnis vor der Staffelei), circa 1908-1909.

Bruce M. White/Princeton University Art Museum/Art Resource, N.Y.

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Bruce M. White/Princeton University Art Museum/Art Resource, N.Y.

Yet, when Fontanella was putting “Gabriele Münter: Contours of a World” together, there was one painting she couldn’t find: Music, from 1916.

In it, a violinist is playing in the center of a yellow room, with two people quietly listening. It’s set in a living room — but because it uses her wild colors and flattened figures, it feels vibrant and dramatic, not cozy or saccharine.

Fontanella said this painting is important because it provides a window into Münter’s life after she separated from Kandinsky, who had gone on to marry someone else. She was struggling financially, and she was no longer the promising young person she once was. But Fontanella said the painting shows she had found a new creative circle.

“There’s something really uplifting about that. You know, it speaks to her resilience, her sense of adaptation,” Fontanella said. Instead of showing those years as dark and challenging, it is serene and warm, joyful. “I think that’s really important because especially with a woman artist, it’s so easy to get tripped up in her biography and really see it colored by her romantic relationships when, in fact, the paintings tell a different story.”

Fontanella said she used every tool available to her to find Music. She worked with Münter’s foundation and contacted owners of collections in Europe and the United States, from institutions to private collectors. She read correspondence and catalogs from past exhibitions.

Gabriele Münter's "From the Griesbräu Window" (Vom Griesbräu Fenster), 1908.

Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus und Kunstbau München, on permanent loan from the Gabriele Münter and Johannes Eichner Foundation, Munich

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Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus und Kunstbau München, on permanent loan from the Gabriele Münter and Johannes Eichner Foundation, Munich

It’s not unusual for art to vanish from public view if it’s not held at an institution. Private collectors often want to keep their holdings quiet. If they don’t sell a particular work at an auction or lend it to a museum, only a very small number of people might know that it still exists and where it is.

Fontanella was able to trace Music to its last known owner — a German collector named Eugen Eisenmann, who had the painting in 1977.

“There was a moment where the collection was starting to be broken apart and dispersed and no longer being held by subsequent relatives or family members,” she said.

Then the trail ended.

Not the end of the story

But just because the painting hasn’t surfaced yet doesn’t mean it never will. Take the story of a piece called There are combustibles in every State, which a spark might set fire to. —Washington, 26 December 1786, depicting Shays’ Rebellion, one of 30 works in the Struggle series by artist Jacob Lawrence. A 2020 traveling exhibition organized by the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Mass., had brought the works together for the first time in 60 years.

Lost Painting By Modernist Master Jacob Lawrence Found In Private Collection

Five of the paintings couldn’t be located, and the curators put placeholders where those paintings should have been: black-and-white photographs of the canvases if they existed, blank spaces if they didn’t.

“We didn’t have any image of it. There really was no trace,” said Sylvia Yount, the curator in charge of the American Wing at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. She co-curated the Met’s presentation of the exhibition with curator Randall Griffey. “We had decided to leave the missing panels as kind of an absence, to really underline the absence. There was a blank on the wall.”

And, then, the miracle.

An American Rebellion, Sparked By Tough Times

A visitor to the exhibition went home, contacted a friend “and said, ‘I think you might have one of these missing panels,’” Yount explained.

The friend did. When Yount, Griffey and art conservator Isabelle Duvernois went to see the painting — which was just across Central Park from the Met in an apartment on the Upper West Side — “we walked in and immediately knew it was right,” Yount said.

Within about two weeks, it was hanging in the exhibition. Incredibly, not long later, a second panel was found. Because that one needed some conservation work and a new frame, it didn’t join the series at the Met, but it did become part of the show later as it traveled across the United States.

That kind of thing “doesn’t happen every day,” Yount said, laughing.

Could it happen again?

But Fontanella hopes that it could happen for Münter’s painting. She included a photograph of it in the catalog so that people would know what to look for.

“What I always hope with stories like this is that the painting will resurface in its own time, you know, when it wants to be discovered,” Fontanella said. “But there’s been so much genuine interest in Gabriele Münter as an artist, as a person, that I feel it’s only just on the horizon that this painting will come to light.”

“Gabriele Münter: Contours of a World” is on view at the Guggenheim in New York through April 2026.

Ciera Crawford edited this story for broadcast and digital. Chloee Weiner mixed the audio.

Lifestyle

Sunday Puzzle: Sweet Treat

Published

4 hours ago

April 12, 2026

Press Room

Sunday Puzzle

NPR

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NPR

This week’s challenge

Every answer today is a flavor of ice cream or sorbet.
What flavor of ice cream …

1. … has a two-word name in which each word starts CH-?

2. … has a two-word name in which each word starts RO-?

3. … is hidden in this sentence: That’s the caravan I’ll announce.

4. … has the string of letters UTTI in its name twice?

5. … has a silent P as its fourth letter?

6. … would spell some men’s facial hair if you changed its first two letters from PI to MU?

7. … consists of the names of two trees starting with M and W?

8. … is a fruit flavor that would become the name of another fruit flavor if you interchanged its first and third letters?

9. … is an anagram of TEENAGER (2 wds.)?

Last week’s challenge

Last week’s challenge came from Michael Schwartz, of Florence, Ore. Think of a musical instrument. Add two letters at the end, and you’ll get the names of two popular automobile models reading left or right. What musical instrument is this?

Answer

Accordion –> (Honda) Accord + (Hyundai) Ioniq

Winner

Nell Newton of Austin, Texas

This week’s challenge

This week’s challenge comes from Benita Rice, of Salem, Ore. Name a famous foreign landmark (5,4). Change the eighth letter to a V and rearrange the result to make an adjective that describes this landmark. What landmark is it?

If you know the answer to the challenge, submit it below by Thursday, April 16 at 3 p.m. ET. Listeners whose answers are selected win a chance to play the on-air puzzle.

Lifestyle

Ask Imran Anything: On Boring Fashion, the Meaning of Luxury and Building Outside the System

Published

5 hours ago

April 12, 2026

Press Room

Ask Imran Anything: On Boring Fashion, the Meaning of Luxury and Building Outside the System

In the second instalment of the BoF Podcast’s Ask Me Anything series, Imran Amed takes on listener questions about creative energy returning to the industry, what luxury really feels like, why independent brands don’t need the old gatekeepers, and how to keep going when the world feels uncertain.

Lifestyle

Trump touts newly released plans for D.C. triumphal arch

Published

16 hours ago

April 11, 2026

Press Room

Trump touts newly released plans for D.C. triumphal arch

Artist renderings and diagrams for President Trump’s proposed triumphal arch released by the U.S. Commission of Fine Arts on April 10, 2026.

Jon Elswick/AP

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Jon Elswick/AP

President Trump on Friday unveiled official architectural renderings for the triumphal arch he plans to add to the National Mall in Washington, D.C.

The proposed monument would stand at one end of the Arlington Memorial Bridge next to the Arlington National Cemetery.

In addition to the president’s post on Truth Social, the plans were released by the Commission on Fine Arts, a federal agency that has review authority over the design and aesthetics of construction within Washington, D.C., and produced by Harrison Design, an architecture, interior and landscape design firm with offices in six U.S. cities, including D.C. The mockup shows a structure very similar to the 3D model that Trump touted at a fundraising dinner at the White House last October.

This model of President Trump’s proposed triumphal arch was shown at a White House press conference on Oct. 15, 2025.

Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images

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Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images

At 250 feet tall, the overall height of the structure is intended to serve as, “a fitting recognition of America’s 250th birthday,” the White House said in an email to NPR.

A monument aimed at honoring what and whom?

The proposed arch bears a striking resemblance to the Arc de Triomphe in Paris — though would stand almost 100 feet taller — and is topped with two golden eagles and a winged, crowned figure reminiscent of the Statue of Liberty (which was gifted to the U.S. by France in 1884.) On one side, the words “One nation under God” appear, with the phrase “Liberty and justice for all” on the other.

The structure would also loom over the nearby Lincoln Memorial — at more than twice the height.

“The Triumphal Arch in Memorial Circle is going to be one of the most iconic landmarks not only in Washington, D.C., but throughout the world,” said White House spokesperson Davis Ingle in an email to NPR. “It will enhance the visitor experience at Arlington National Cemetery for veterans, the families of the fallen, and all Americans alike, serving as a visual reminder of the noble sacrifices borne by so many American heroes throughout our 250 year history so we can enjoy our freedoms today. President Trump will continue to honor our veterans and give the greatest Nation on earth — America — the glory it deserves.”

When asked by CBS political correspondent Ed O’Keefe whom the monument was intended to honor after Trump initially unveiled his plans in October, Trump responded: “Me.” The exchange was captured in a social media video.

A group of Vietnam War veterans launched a lawsuit in February seeking to bar the Trump administration from constructing the arch. The plaintiffs argued the project violates statutes requiring express congressional authorization for the erection of commemorative works or any “building or structure” on federal park grounds in D.C., among other issues.

The Arc de Triomphe in Paris as part of the city’s Christmas celebrations (2007).

Christophe Ena/AP

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Christophe Ena/AP

“It’s textbook Trump,” said Sue Mobley, director of research at Monument Lab, of the proposed plans for the arch, in an interview with NPR. The nonprofit design studio based in Philadelphia reimagines public art and structures. “It has to be the biggest. That’s the authoritarian impulse.” Trump has repeatedly pushed back on accusations of authoritarianism, rejecting the label of dictator.

Mobley added that she doesn’t think the plans will come to fruition. “It will likely get tied up in court,” she said.

Approval process

The White House said it will “follow all legal requirements” in constructing the triumphal arch. As part of that process, it mentioned the National Park Service’s recent request to present potential designs to the Commission on Fine Arts. The plans are scheduled to be reviewed next week. At this point, that commission is composed entirely of members appointed by Trump. (In October 2025, Trump took the unusual step of firing six sitting members of the commission.) The National Capital Planning Commission, the federal government’s central planning agency for the National Capital Region, is also expected to weigh in on the plans.

The White House said the estimated cost of the project, which it anticipates will draw on a combination of public and private funds, is still being calculated. Harrison Design, the architecture firm behind the plans, did not immediately respond to NPR’s request for information about the price tag.

Multiple D.C. makeover projects

The arch plans are the latest in a series of current and potential architectural interventions from the White House in and around Washington, D.C.

Most dramatically, the administration is pushing for the creation of a $400 million neoclassical ballroom at the White House. A federal appeals court on Saturday temporarily allowed the construction of the ballroom to move forward while the administration challenges a March ruling that it required congressional approval. Whatever the outcome, the historic East Wing has already been demolished to make room for the new structure.

Trump has converted the White House Rose Garden into a stone-covered patio. He aims to shut down The Kennedy Center for two years to facilitate a major renovation (a coalition of groups including the National Trust for Historic Preservation, the American Institute of Architects, and the D.C. Preservation League, filed a lawsuit in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia in March opposing the plans.) And he has proposed architectural changes to the Washington Dulles International airport through an initiative the Department of Transportation launched late last year to overhaul the Northern Virginia airport. Several prominent architecture firms including Zaha Hadid Architects and Adjaye Associates have submitted proposals.

In August, the president also signed an executive order requiring that new federal buildings with construction budgets of more than $50 million be designed in “classical” or “traditional” styles.

Anastasia Tsioulcas contributed to this story.