Holbein portrait, Inuit print collection and Antony Gormley sculpture: May acquisitions round-up

Portrait of Desiderius Erasmus (around 1532) by Hans Holbein the Younger

Fenix, Rotterdam

Hans Holbein the Younger was known to have painted three portraits of the Dutch humanist philosopher and theologian Desiderius Erasmus in 1523, when they were both living in the Swiss city of Basel. Erasmus, one of the most influential thinkers of the Northern Renaissance and a self-described “citizen of the world”, sought refuge from religious conflicts in Basel for several years. Holbein’s workshop produced a second sequence of portraits of a visibly older Erasmus around 1530, including this previously unknown panel painting, which was recently authenticated. Acquired at Christie’s in London for £1.1m in 2022, it will be a highlight of the new displays at Fenix, a museum of migration opening on 16 May in Erasmus’s home city of Rotterdam.

René Balcer and Carolyn Hsu-Balcer Inuit Print Collection

Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

With this gift of more than 500 prints by Inuit artists from Nunavut and Nunavik, collectors René Balcer and Carolyn Hsu-Balcer hope to “demonstrate that the Inuit and their culture are very much alive and very much engaged in the modern world”. Ranging from the mid-1940s to the present, the collection spans images of birds and animals, Inuit people, hunting scenes, dreams and cosmologies as well as diverse printmaking methods, including sealskin stencils and stone-cuts. Balcer, a Montreal-born TV writer and producer, began collecting Inuit art in the late 1970s, having worked in remote communities of the Canadian North alongside Indigenous coworkers.

RULE II (2019) by Antony Gormley

Island of Delos, Greece

For six months in 2019 the iron “bodyforms” of Antony Gormley inhabited the tiny Aegean island of Delos—the sacred birthplace of Apollo and Artemis, according to the ancient Greeks. The site-specific installation was organised by NEON, the foundation of collector Dimitris Daskalopoulos, in collaboration with Greece’s regional culture authorities. Now, Gormley’s stylised sitting figure, RULE II, will be permanently installed outside the Archaeological Museum of Delos. It marks the first in a series of donations from NEON to the ancient Greek sites where it has staged contemporary art exhibitions over the past 12 years. The gift was described by the Greek culture minister, Lina Mendoni, as a symbol of “the harmonious coexistence of cultural heritage and contemporary creation”.