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Boston’s Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum announced that it will host the exhibition Last Seen by the French artist Sophie Calle beginning on October 24, 2013. The show will feature works created by Calle in 1991 in response to the Gardner’s tragic heist, which took place the year before. New works created in 2012 will also be on view.

The exhibition presents 14 photographic and text based works divided into two categories. The first series includes pieces created shortly after the heist, which saw the theft of 13 works by Vermeer, Rembrandt, Édouard Manet, Edgar Degas, and others. The second series was created at the Gardner Museum while Calle was revisiting her earlier project.

Soon after the heist, Calle interviewed curators, guards and other staff from the Gardner in front of the museum’s stark walls. Years later she repeated the process but this time, in front of the empty frames that the Gardner later hung. She asked her interviewees what they remembered of the missing works and what they saw when they looked at the blank frames. She used text from the interviews and her own photos to create visual interpretations of loss and memory. Pieranna Cavalchini, the Tom and Lisa Blumenthal Curator of Contemporary Art at the Gardner, said, “This exhibition is a poignant reminder of just how much power art and a great artist like Sophie Calle can yield in bringing life, energy and beauty to what is in essence a never-ending story of loss.”

Last Seen will be on view at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum through October 24, 2014.

On Monday, April 29, 2013 the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and the Israel Museum in Jerusalem announced that they had come together to jointly acquire the Mishneh Torah. A rare 15^th century illuminated Hebrew manuscript, the Mishneh Torah features text from Moses Maimonides, a Jewish writer and philosopher from the Middle Ages. The Met and the Israel Museum have agreed to exhibit the Torah at both institutions on a rotating schedule.

Created in 1457, the Mishneh Torah is the second of a two-volume manuscript and features six large illustrations and 32 smaller images in the style of Northern Italian Renaissance miniature painting. The Vatican owns the first volume of the manuscript. The Mishneh Torah was restored at the Israel Museum’s conservation lab and has been on loan to the institution since 2007.

The Mishneh Torah was to be the leading item at an auction of the collection of Michael and Judy Steinhardt on Monday at Sotheby’s. The manuscript, which was expected to bring between $4.5 million and $6 million at auction, was purchased by the museums before the sale began. Sotheby’s has declined to reveal how much the two institutions paid for the Mishneh Torah.

Michael Steinhardt, a hedge fund manager and philanthropist, and his wife, Judy, have amassed a renowned Judaica collection, which includes silver and decorative objects, textiles, and fine art. Steinhardt said, “The acquisition of this remarkable manuscript by the Israel Museum and the Metropolitan Museum of Art is poetic given Judy’s and my longstanding involvement with both institutions; it is particularly meaningful that this event marks the first significant collaboration between the two museums.”