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Haider Ackermann Leads Tom Ford Into a New Era

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Haider Ackermann Leads Tom Ford Into a New Era

One evening in late January, Haider Ackermann, the new designer at Tom Ford, was tucked into a velvet banquette at La Reserve, the discreet, tryst-worthy hotel not far from the Élysée Palace in Paris. He was doing his best impression of Tom Ford, the man.

“Hello, Haider,” Mr. Ackermann purred, his voice dropping an octave and taking on a sultry tone. He was acting out a phone call he had received. “It’s Tom.” He paused to take a breath, as if he were tasting the air. “Call me,” he said, making it sound like “come here.”

Then, his voice back to normal, he added, “Of course I did.”

That was about eight months ago. It turned out Mr. Ford, who had sold the company that bears his name to Estée Lauder in 2022, had a proposition for Mr. Ackermann. After only a year, the new owners — Lauder and Ermenegildo Zegna — had decided that Mr. Ford’s immediate successor, Peter Hawkings, was not the right man for the brand.

To replace him, they had only one name on their list, “and that name was me,” Mr. Ackermann said. Though he had recently taken a job as creative director of the outdoor company Canada Goose and was in the midst of negotiations to become the designer of a big French fashion house, Mr. Ackermann started fantasizing about Tom Ford.

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“I was immediately thinking about what I should do,” he said. “What I would do.”

Now, after multiple conversations with Mr. Ford, Mr. Ackermann is on the verge of introducing a new Tom Ford collection for men and women. The goal is to do what Mr. Hawkings could not and redefine Tom Ford for the post-Tom Ford era.

Mr. Ackermann has moved the fashion show to Paris from Milan and is in the process of moving the company headquarters from London. He has teased his new look on his friend Timothée Chalamet, who wore custom Tom Ford by Haider Ackermann on the red carpet at the Golden Globes in January: a skinny, rhinestone-speckled black suit with a sky blue polka-dot silk scarf slung around his neck. But he is still trying to find “the thread between what I call sensuality and what Mr. Ford called sexuality,” he said.

“The exercise is more difficult than I thought it would be,” Mr. Ackermann said, noting that he had not made a knee-length pencil skirt, a Tom Ford signature, in his entire career. But, he went on, “the man, the woman, they are not strangers to me. I know we will get together, but it takes time.”

Especially because it turns out this particular relationship is kind of a throuple.

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“The complexity of this story is that the house of Tom Ford is Mr. Ford,” Mr. Ackermann said. “There’s no other ambassador than Mr. Ford.” Tom Ford is his ghost in the machine.

Plenty of designers have taken over houses that still bear the names of the designers who founded them: Dior, Chanel, Givenchy, Gucci, Saint Laurent — these were all real people. That’s where the idea of brand “DNA” originates.

But at a certain point, a brand can become so divorced from its founder that the name is just an abstraction. Once enough other designers have inherited the title, it’s hard to remember that clients were once loyal to a specific silhouette or design. That opens up the possibility for new creative directors to make the house their own.

A house like Tom Ford is somewhat different. That’s because it’s only 20 years old, and, whatever his official status, Mr. Ford still seems very much around.

Founded by Mr. Ford and his business partner, Domenico De Sole, in 2005, Tom Ford-the-brand was a kind of test case: Would Mr. Ford, who had become a celebrity by remaking Gucci and creating Gucci Group (the seed of the conglomerate that eventually became Kering) before leaving in 2004 to make movies, have enough name recognition to build a label from scratch on the mere power of his stubbly, unbuttoned-shirt appeal?

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The partners started by licensing fragrance (to Lauder), then eyewear and then expanded into men’s wear (with Zegna) and women’s wear. But while the beauty line became a smash hit, and the suiting did fine, the women’s line always seemed more of a red-carpet indulgence than an actual business.

Nevertheless, just over two years ago, after Mr. Ford’s husband died and he decided to focus on filmmaking (again), Estée Lauder paid $2.8 billion to buy the house, enlisting Zegna to handle the fashion side. Mr. Hawkings, who had worked with Mr. Ford for 25 years, was named designer. He was, Mr. Ford said in an Instagram post, “the perfect creative director.”

It did not take long, however, before rumor had it that Mr. Ford was not happy with comments Mr. Hawkings had made that seemed critical. The reception of Mr. Hawkings’s first collections was mixed, and Mr. Ford, in what seemed like a very public repudiation, wore Saint Laurent to last year’s Met Gala. By July, Mr. Hawkings was out. Soon after, Mr. Ford was on the phone with Mr. Ackermann.

“Mr. Ford and I, we had always been flirting with each other professionally,” Mr. Ackermann said. When Mr. Ackermann was fired from a previous job as creative director of Berluti in a designer reshuffle, Mr. Ford “wrote me such a beautiful letter,” Mr. Ackermann said. “Karl Lagerfeld was the first, and he was the second. It was so moving.”

Mr. Ackermann, 52, is something of a fashion designer’s designer. A Colombian orphan who was adopted by a French couple, he spent his childhood moving around the world with his cartographer father before his parents settled in the Netherlands. He attended the Academy of Fine Arts in Antwerp but was kicked out before graduation. (If he did not feel he had anything to say to a teacher, he said, he just did not go to class.) He started his own namesake label in 2003.

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His work was characterized by an extraordinary facility with color and decadent romance; he calls his aesthetic “bohemian dreamer.” At one point, Mr. Lagerfeld was enchanted enough to suggest that Mr. Ackermann succeed him at Chanel.

He spent two years at Berluti, but after a dispute with his backer, he lost control of his label and name. Though he has since regained ownership of that name, he was off the runway for a time, save for a much lauded one-off stint as a guest designer for Jean Paul Gaultier couture and the occasional custom order from his famous friends, Mr. Chalamet (whom he has been dressing since 2017) and Tilda Swinton. He calls them “the big Ts.”

As Ms. Swinton tells it, they met in 2004. He sent her a gown for the Cannes Film Festival, but he did not show up for the fittings because he had promised his partner at the time a trip to India. Later, he said, she called and invited him for a patisserie and asked him why he had not been there, and they bonded over the idea of putting relationships over business. She has worn his designs ever since, and they speak, she said, “several times a week.”

“He’s a proper romantic and proper punk, which is the best combination,” Ms. Swinton said, describing his work as “ancient and supersonic at the same time.”

Daphne Guinness, the artist and collector, said Mr. Ackermann was “a Saint Laurent for the space age.” At this point, she calculated that she had about 40 Ackermann pieces in her wardrobe, including the first four looks of his Gaultier couture collection.

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During his time away from the runway, Mr. Ackermann did a collaboration with Fila. Then Canada Goose got in touch. “It was very interesting,” he said, going from “being this very niche designer to talking to thousands of people. I had never worn a parka before. Now, I love it. But somebody told me recently that it made my legs look very short.”

Mr. Ackermann has been converted to the joys of camping instead of clubbing. He is a famously good dancer — “incredible,” Ms. Swinton said — and his favorite haunt used to be a club in Rotterdam where, he said, “I was the only boy who didn’t have a shaved hair.” His last summer vacation, however, was spent in a tent in British Columbia. It’s good for perspective.

That’s when he realized that the “massive failure” of losing his own brand “brought me to today, where I understand what I do and why I’m doing it.”

It also brought him to Tom Ford. Gildo Zegna, the chief executive of the Ermenegildo Zegna Group (which also owns Zegna and Thom Browne), described meeting Mr. Ackermann in Paris. “We clicked,” Mr. Zegna said. “We had two long days together, walking around, sitting in the garden, and the social part, the friendly part, was as important as the business part.”

Well, that and the fact that, Mr. Zegna said, “he had the support of Tom Ford, which was very important.”

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Which raises the question of what Mr. Ford was doing pulling the strings of a brand he supposedly had nothing to do with. Though Mr. De Sole is on the board of Zegna, Mr. Ford has had no official role in the company since the sale. He declined to comment for this piece, and Mr. Zegna was quick to de-emphasize his role, even as he acknowledged that Mr. Ackermann was Mr. Ford’s idea. But it further raises the stakes for Mr. Ackermann.

“The moment that you work for a house, you have to know your place,” Mr. Ackermann said. “It’s not about you. It’s about you at the service of the house.”

“I didn’t think it was going to be easy to take the role, knowing that somebody has been kicked out in a violent way,” he continued, referring to the departure of Mr. Hawkings. “I’ve been through it. I know what rejection can feel like.”

He is very careful to use the honorific “Mr.” when he speaks of Mr. Ford. (He calls him Tom when they meet in person, he said.) Even as he added: “If people are expecting hot sex, no, you will not see it from me. I don’t have that talent, to be very provocative or very avant-garde. I have different codes. I’m not there to continue exactly the past.”

“We had an appointment in London for lunch one time,” Mr. Ackermann said, describing a meeting with Mr. Ford when they were in the wooing stages. “I arrived earlier, and when he entered the restaurant, he didn’t see me standing in the corner, so I could just observe him. The way he entered the room — the security, the audacity he had in his posture — everyone in the room was looking. It intrigued me. Perhaps, coming from a very Catholic background, I could not be this person. But perhaps, somewhere deep inside, I would like to be this person. To have that kind of freedom.”

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That, Mr. Ackermann said, is what his Tom Ford man represents. As for the woman: “I don’t believe in big words like glamour and power. The power of women is not big shoulders. The power of women is what she’s got inside her, the fragility that she eventually wants to show.”

It was two weeks before the Paris show, and he was sitting in his atelier with a vase of white calla lilies behind him. “They are a little more pure than Black Orchid,” he said, referring to one of Mr. Ford’s signature perfumes. “But I think still poisonous and dangerous.” He had decided that his connection to the brand was more about his own memories than any specific silhouette.

“Like in 2012, I went to the Met Gala,” he said. “I was really nervous. I was like, ‘Oh my God, what am I going to wear?’ I’m too shy. But Anna Wintour said: ‘You’ve got no choice. You have to come.’”

So Mr. Ackermann went to a Tom Ford shop and bought a black suit with black dots. And when he was on the Met red carpet, he bumped into Mr. Ford. “He looked at me and said, ‘Oh, you look so smart,’” Mr. Ackermann said. “I was so happy. Then I realized he was not looking at me. He was looking at his suit. So obviously, you will see black dots in the show.”

There will also be knee-length skirts, though Mr. Ackermann was still “trying to find the right line that doesn’t feel too vulgar or too much secretary. I’m challenging myself for sure.”

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Mr. Zegna said he believed growth would come for women’s wear, accessories and the European business. Because of the Hawkings issue, the owners are a year behind in their strategic plan. The turnaround has to happen “fast,” he said. “We have not invested to not get returns.”

That’s partly why Mr. Ackermann moved the show to Paris: to signal an ambition to compete at the highest level. Also, he said, “I don’t think Mr. Ford had the easiest time in Paris,” a reference to the period when Mr. Ford appointed himself head of Saint Laurent, to the public criticism of Pierre Bergé and Yves Saint Laurent.

“For me, it was a way to say thank you for trusting me, giving me the honor to continue your story,” Mr. Ackermann said. “I want the world to look at Tom Ford in Paris. The name deserves it, and you deserve it.”

Only 200 people are invited to the show, including Mr. Ford and Mr. De Sole. “I wanted to have something intimate,” Mr. Ackermann said. “I believe that’s what luxury is. It shouldn’t be accessible to everything and everyone. I think the world needs less of a circus. I want it to feel rich, and I want it to feel noble, but I also want it to be quiet. To command attention without screaming.”

Mr. Ackermann has scattered the collection with Easter eggs for Mr. Ford — “things,” he said, “where he will be the only one to see it.”

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“If it goes wrong, it goes wrong,” he continued. “But I have no fear. If, after the 5th of March at 7:30, Mr. Ford can say, ‘I made the right choice,’ if I make Mr. Zegna and Mr. Lauder proud, then, OK. Let’s go for it. I’m going to a secret place with the team members and my friends, and we’re going to dance the hell out of it.”

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Sunday Puzzle: P-A-R-T-Y words and names

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Sunday Puzzle: P-A-R-T-Y words and names

On-air challenge

Today I’ve brought a game of ‘Categories’ based on the word “party.” For each category I give, you tell me something in it starting with each of the letters, P-A-R-T-Y.  For example, if the category were “Four-Letter Boys’ Names” you might say Paul, Adam, Ross, Tony, and Yuri. Any answer that works is OK, and you can give answers in any order.

1. Colors

2. Major League Baseball Teams

3. Foreign Rivers

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4. Foods for a Thanksgiving Meal

Last week’s challenge

I was at a library. On the shelf was a volume whose spine said “OUT TO SEA.” When I opened the volume, I found the contents has nothing to do with sailing or the sea in any sense. It wasn’t a book of fiction either. What was in the volume?

Challenge answer

It was a volume of an encyclopedia with entries from OUT- to SEA-.

Winner

Mark Karp of Marlboro Township, N.J.

This week’s challenge

This week’s challenge comes from Joseph Young, of St. Cloud, Minn. Think of a two-syllable word in four letters. Add two letters in front and one letter behind to make a one-syllable word in seven letters. What words are these?

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If you know the answer to the challenge, submit it below by Wednesday, December 31 at 3 p.m. ET. Listeners whose answers are selected win a chance to play the on-air puzzle.

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L.A. Affairs: We were just newlyweds when an emergency room visit tested our vows

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L.A. Affairs: We were just newlyweds when an emergency room visit tested our vows

“I’m his wife,” I said to the on-call doctor, asserting my place in the cramped exam room. It was a label I’d only recently acquired. A year ago, it had seemed silly to obtain government proof of what we’d known to be true for six years: We were life partners. Now I was so grateful we signed that piece of paper.

Earlier that morning, I’d driven my husband to an ER in Torrance for what we’d assumed was a nasty flu or its annoying bacterial equivalent. We’d imagined a round of industrial-grade antibiotics, and then heading home in time for our 3-year-old’s usual bath-time routine.

But the doctor’s face was serious. Machines beeped and whirred as my husband laid on the hospital bed. Whatever supernatural power colloquially known as a “gut feeling” flat-lined in my stomach.

“It’s leukemia,” she said, putting a clinical end to what had been our honeymoon period.

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Only six months earlier, a female Elvis impersonator had declared us husband and wife. A burlesque dancer pressed her cleavage into both of our faces as our friends cheered and threw dollar bills. A wedding in Vegas was my idea.

After two years of dating Marty, a cute roller hockey player with an unwavering moral compass, I knew I wanted to have a child with him. It was marriage, not commitment, that unnerved me. I wanted romance, freedom and to do things my way. The word “wife” induced an allergic reaction.

As Marty and I became parents and navigated adulthood together, my resistance to matrimony started to feel like an outdated quirk. The emotional equivalent of a person still rocking a septum piercing long after they stopped listening to punk music.

Marty had shown me, over and over, what it was to be a teammate. He’d rubbed my back through hours of labor, made late-night runs for infant Tylenol and was never afraid to cry at the sad parts of movies or take the occasional harsh piece of feedback about his communication style. And like all good teams, we kicked ass together. So why was I still resisting something that meant so much to him? To our family?

One random Saturday, at the Hawthorne In-N-Out Burger, after Marty ordered fries as a treat for our son, I finally said, “Screw it. Let’s get married.”

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The wedding day was raucous and covered in glitter. We both wore white. Our son’s jacket had a roaring tiger stitched onto the back and was layered over his toddler-size tuxedo T-shirt. Loved ones from all over the country flew to meet us in a tiny pink chapel. A neon heart buzzed over our heads as we vowed to “love each other in sickness and in health, till death do us part.”

I couldn’t have imagined then that the next chapel I’d be in would be the hospital prayer room. Or that I would have begged a God I struggle to believe in to please spare Marty’s life.

Unlike our decision to marry, acute leukemia came on suddenly. Over the course of a few weeks, Marty’s bone marrow had flooded his blood with malignant cells. Treatment was urgent. He was taken by ambulance from the ER to the City of Hope hospital in Duarte, a part of Los Angeles County we’d never had a reason to visit before.

Traditionally the 50th wedding anniversary is celebrated with gold, the 25th with silver and the first with paper. But we couldn’t even afford to look paper-far-ahead anymore. Instead, we celebrated that the specific genetic modifiers of Marty’s cancer were treatable, the good chemo days and his being able to walk to the hospital lobby to see our son for the first time in weeks.

Leukemia has taught me things such as: how to inject antifungal medication into the open PICC (peripherally inserted central catheter) line in Marty’s veins, how to explain to our son that “Papa will be sleeping with the doctors for a long while so they can help him feel better” and that to do the hibbity-dibbity with a person going through chemo, you must wear a condom. But mostly my husband’s sickness has taught me about healthy love.

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When we had a child together, we’d committed to being in each other’s lives forever. But marriage was different. We’d already made a promise to our son, but when we got married, we made one to each other and ourselves. We had gone all in.

Since his diagnosis two months ago, there have been so many ways we’ve shown love for each other. People assume that I would do all the caregiving, but it’s more than that. Yes, I’ve washed my husband’s feet when he couldn’t bend down, been the only parent at preschool dropoff and pickup, and advocated on Marty’s behalf to his health insurance with only a few choice expletives.

But my husband has also taken care of me. Even when he was nauseous, sweating and fatigued, Marty showed up. He made me laugh with macabre jokes about how the only way for us to watch anything other than “PAW Patrol” on TV together was for him to get hospitalized. He insisted that I make time to rest and bring him the car owner’s manual, so he could figure out why the check engine light had come on.

We’d promised in front of our closest friends and Elvis herself to love each other “for better or worse.” And when the worst arrived sooner than expected, we did more than love. We truly cared for each other as husband and wife.

The author is a writer whose short stories have been nominated for the PEN/Robert J. Dau Short Story Prize for Emerging Writers and Best of the Net. She is working on a novel and lives in Redondo Beach with her husband and son. She’s on Instagram: @RachelReallyChapman.

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L.A. Affairs chronicles the search for romantic love in all its glorious expressions in the L.A. area, and we want to hear your true story. We pay $400 for a published essay. Email LAAffairs@latimes.com. You can find submission guidelines here. You can find past columns here.

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This painting is missing. Do you have it?

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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.

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

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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.

Gabriele Münter’s Self-Portrait in Front of an Easel (Selbstbildnis vor der Staffelei), circa 1908-1909. Oil on canvas. (© 2025 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn)

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.

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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.

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

Gabriele Münter’s From the Griesbräu Window (Vom Griesbräu Fenster), 1908. Painting on board. (© 2025 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn)

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

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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.

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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.

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.

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

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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.”

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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.

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