Portfolio

Home is where the art is: Step inside conceptual artist David Ireland’s greatest masterpiece

“I haven’t seen anything quite like it” is an oft-repeated phrase used to describe 500 Capp Street—the San Francisco home of the late US artist David Ireland (1930-2009). The 130-year-old building, which is considered to be the conceptual artist’s masterpiece, is a smart, two-storey Victorian house on a street mostly lined with new-builds. But within this unassuming structure lies a secret…

Top 100 most-visited art museums of 2020 revealed: attendance to world’s galleries drops by 77%

In an ordinary year, more than nine million visitors jostle for position in front of the Mona Lisa or Delacroix’s Liberty Leading the People at the Musée du Louvre in Paris, and half a million fashion-forward members of the public turn out for the spring opening of the Costume Institute’s annual exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. But there was nothing ordinary about 2020…

Dive Into a British Summer at Heckfield Place

If your clients are looking for a summer retreat in the English countryside, Heckfield Place in Hampshire offers guests ample space to immerse themselves in their picturesque  surroundings. The 45-bedroom Georgian manor is set within 438 acres of woodlands, lakes, meadows and lush gardens. Just an hour from London, it’s an easy-to-reach country escape for a long weekend or a great way to ease into a longer vacation in the U.K.

Campers Have Smores Fun at Atlantis Paradise Island

Summer just isn’t summer without camping, and if you want to sleep under the stars they might as well be big, beautiful Bahamian ones. Atlantis Paradise Island is offering a new Marine Life Camping Adventure, now through Aug. 27, 2022, where guests can camp out in luxurious beachside tents and get up close and personal with the local marine life. 

Take Art Classes at Bali’s Tanah Gajah Resort

Tanah Gajah, a Resort by Hadiprana, is offering its guests private art classes led by local artists, many of whom have works of art displayed in the Balinese property. Guests can book 3-hour painting lessons for IDR1,500,000 ($104) and receive additional classes at a 50 percent reduced rate. As many of the artists’ work can be found throughout the resort, guests can choose a tutor whose style most resonates with them… 

Virtuoso Teams Up With Virgin Galactic for Space Tourism

Virtuoso’s clients could soon be traveling on one of Virgin Galactic’s space flights. A new partnership between the two companies gives Virtuoso travel advisors exclusive access to a limited number of reservations within Virgin Galactic’s first 1,000 seats. In May, the aerospace company said it expected to launch its commercial flight service in the first quarter of 2023.  “Travel transforms us and pushes us out of our comfort zone…” 

Online antiquities smugglers are taking advantage of the coronavirus crisis

The online trade of illicit antiquities seems to be on the rise during the coronavirus crisis. The Antiquities Trafficking and Heritage Anthropology Research (ATHAR) Project, which investigates and documents the digital underworld of trafficking in looted artefacts, has found an uptick in posts on Facebook groups involved in buying and selling looted objects from the Middle East and North Africa in recent months, as many countries….

Baha Mar Plans Bahamas Culinary & Arts Festival for October

In October, chefs, artists, foodies and art lovers will gather at Baha Mar for the inaugural Bahamas Culinary & Arts Festival. The event will take place at the Nassau resort from Oct. 21-23, 2022. Michelin-starred Marcus Samuelsson of Marcus at Baha Mar Fish + Chop House, Michelin-starred Daniel Boulud of Café Boulud and Dario Cecchini of the steakhouse Carna will headline the event and will be joined by…

Miami, Orlando & Tampa Restaurants Make Michelin Guide

Eleven restaurants from Miami Beach and the Greater Miami area were awarded Michelin stars at the recent release of the 2022 Michelin Guide to Miami, Orlando and Tampa—Michelin’s first culinary guide to Florida. A further four restaurants in Orlando also received stars. Miami’s popular modern French restaurant, L’Atelier de Joël Robuchon, is the only eatery in the new culinary guide to receive two stars. In total, 118 Florida restaurants made the guidebook.

Getty Conservation Institute helps museums rethink stringent guidelines on conservation

Museums are under increased pressure to find sustainable solutions to managing their collection environments. The one-size-fits-all approach traditionally applied to temperature and relative humidity levels for objects, regardless of what material they are made of, is expensive and can thwart an institution’s efforts to reduce its carbon footprint…

MFA Boston launches new research centre focusing on Dutch and Flemish art

The Museum of Fine Arts (MFA) in Boston is set to become a major resource in the study of Dutch and Flemish art with the launch of its Center for Netherlandish Art (CNA) later this year. Its opening coincides with the US museum’s year-long celebrations marking its 150th anniversary…

New in Travel: Five Fun ‘Friendcation’ Packages

With travel well and firmly back on the agenda, many travelers are looking for getaways where they can reconnect with old pals, celebrate friendships and create new memories. From picnics and bike rides in Tuscany to pool parties in Mexico with 22 of your closest friends, here are five options for those in search of where to spend their next “Friendcation”.

Miami Design District aims to fill in the fair gap with winter arts event

The Miami Design District is setting its sights on becoming the city’s hub for art collectors who might be missing a physical Art Basel edition this winter by hosting ten days of arts programming, from 27 November to 6 December. The initiative will see the Design Miami fair return to its original home in the Moore Building, and feature live events, activations and shows by “major international galleries that regularly exhibit” … 

Art’s Most Popular: here are 2019’s most visited exhibitions and museums

It’s official: Ai Weiwei is the world’s most popular artist. The Chinese dissident’s travelling survey in Brazil—his first in the South American country and his largest exhibition to date—was a runaway hit and the highest-ranking show by a single artist in our visitor figures survey for 2019. More than 1.1 million people in total came to see the exhibition that started at Oca in São Paulo with stops in Belo Horizonte and Curitiba before landing at Centro…

More people, more problems: when busy shows go wrong

Blockbusters are often seen as a simple marker of success: the more visitors, the better. Earlier this year 30,000 free tickets to the Louvre’s once-in-a-lifetime display of works by Leonardo were snapped up in just three hours by those desperate to catch the final days of the Paris exhibition—even if it meant opting for a 3am viewing. And already, thousands have turned up to see Tutankhamun’s treasures in London, despite the hefty £31 full-price entry fee… 

The exceptional piece of calligraphy at the centre of one of 2019’s most popular—and most controversial—exhibitions

Exhibitions at the Tokyo National Museum rank high in The Art Newspaper’s Art’s Most Popular visitor attendance survey. But the Japanese museum’s show on Tang Dynasty calligrapher Yan Zhenqing (709-785) was not without controversy. Caught in the crossfire of rising political tensions between China and Taiwan…

Manga beats Rembrandt and Captain Cook to be named the British Museum’s most popular show

Manga beats Rembrandt and Captain Cook to be named the most popular exhibition at the British Museum (BM) last year, according to The Art Newspaper’s Art’s Most Popular visitor attendance survey. The largest show on the subject ever to be staged outside Japan presented genga (original drawings) by manga masters old and new as well as popular anime…

‘Cursed’ horn trumpets among highlights of King Tut show opening in London this week

By November 1922, the British archaeologist Howard Carter had spent six long seasons searching for King Tutankhamun’s tomb. His sponsor, the Earl of Carnarvon, was about to pull the plug on the project when a single step cut into the earth was uncovered… 

The Sistine Chapel’s system upgrade: Nam June Paik’s immersive video to be recreated for Tate

The Sistine Chapel is coming to London this month. And while it may not be the Renaissance original, the effort exerted to resurrect Nam June Paik’s 1990s technological twist on Michelangelo’s masterpiece makes this feat no less impressive…

Fondation Beyeler’s Young Picasso exhibition is the second most popular in the Swiss museum’s history

Art Basel visitors have helped to make The Young Picasso: Blue and Rose Periods at the Fondation Beyeler the second most popular show in the Swiss institution’s history. As we went to press on Thursday—with three days before it was due to close on Sunday—the exhibition had drawn 316,000 visitors (around 2,400 people a day) since it opened on 3 February. Before Picasso, the…

See 150 years of fashion in 60 minutes at the Met

We are certainly living in strange times. So it is fitting that the Metropolitan Museum of Art is taking a rather unexpected view of time for its latest Costume Institute fashion show, titled About Time: Fashion and Duration. For the Met’s 150th anniversary, the Costume Institute’s lead curator, Andrew Bolton, was keen to celebrate the museum’s collection, but was not interested in mounting a run-of-the-mill “best of” show…

Fluorescent rabbits, slime, mould and bacteria: artists get biological

We are in the midst of a golden age of biotechnology. Cloning, human augmentation, DNA editing, genetic manipulation and xenotransplantation (inter-species grafting of organs or tissues) used to be the stuff of science fiction or gothic novels—Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein comes to mind—but have now become fact. As biological scientists reshape the way we view ourselves and the world around us, artists are responding by engaging with living…

Both sides now: Tate Britain to show rare two-faced painting by Aubrey Beardsley

Aubrey Beardsley (1872-98), the go-to illustrator of “naughty nineties” England, is only known to have painted two pictures during his brief yet prolific career, and Tate Britain is fortunate to own both of them. The catch is that the London museum has only shown one in the ten decades since they entered the collection. The reason…

How the art world is going green

After years of talking the talk, the art world now appears to be walking the walk when it comes to improving its green credentials. While artists such as Olafur Eliasson and Sebastião Salgado have long addressed society’s need to face the climate crisis, the arts sector is finally examining its own contribution to it…

A dash of fashion and a pinch of gratis: the perfect recipe for a sell-out exhibition

Like it or not, immersive experiences are moving into territory traditionally reserved for conventional exhibitions. And moreover, the art-loving public cannot seem to get enough of them, with people queuing for hours to experience (and take those all-important Instagram photographs of) multi-sensory exhibits such as Yayoi Kusama: Infinity Mirror Room or David Bowie Is… If you want people to come, try calling it an experience…

Art’s Most Popular: here are 2018’s most visited shows and museums

Nearly two decades have passed since the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York last topped The Art Newspaper’s annual museum exhibition attendance survey with its 2001 show on Vermeer. The US institution made a spectacular re-entry into our leaderboard this year with not just the one, but the two most popular exhibitions of 2018. Heavenly Bodies: Fashion and the Catholic Imagination, a Costume Institute show that boldly mixed…

Larry Bell, Through the looking glass

The US artist Larry Bell has spent the better part of 50 years investigating the properties of light and how it interacts with surfaces, pushing the boundaries of sculpture and perception. “I’ve always considered everything I’ve done to be experimental,” explains the 78-year-old artist. Bell, who splits his time between Los Angeles and Taos, New Mexico, uses industrial materials and techniques as part of his never ending exploration of light, shadows and reflection. One of the leading artists to emerge from California’s 1960s…

John Singleton Copley double portrait lovingly restored, pock marks and all

Pock marks, battle scars and strands of grey hair are not physical attributes that many would want to see in their portrait, but these features are just the sort of distinct physical markings that John Singleton Copley delighted in capturing. A recent project at the Philadelphia Museum of Art sought to restore these so-called imperfections…

V&A opens up towering replica of Trajan’s column in revamped Cast Courts

The Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A) has added a new twist to an old classic. The towering reproduction of Trajan’s Column has been one of the London institution’s star exhibits—and its largest object—for nearly 150 years. But from 1 December, visitors will be able to do more than just gaze at the 19th-century plaster cast of the Roman monument: they can go inside it…

Rachel Whiteread’s breakthrough work Ghost gets complex conservation treatment

The recent conservation of Rachel Whiteread’s large-scale work Ghost (1990) was one of the most complex treatments ever undertaken by the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC. The project to restore and stabilise the 9ft-tall by 11.5ft-wide plaster installation involved nearly every division in the Washington DC-based museum, says Molly Donovan, the co-curator…

Warship figureheads restored ahead of opening for new Plymouth arts complex

Meet Royal William, also known as “King Billy”. At more than four metres tall, he is the largest of five historic ships’ figureheads undergoing treatment ahead of their installation at The Box, a new arts and heritage complex that is due to open in Plymouth in 2020. On loan from the city’s National Museum of the Royal Navy, the 19th-century wooden statue of William IV, which once adorned the 1830s 120-gun warship HMS Royal William…

Collector’s Eye: Art lover Frank Cohen tells us what he has bought and why

If you ask Frank Cohen when he caught the collecting bug, he will say he always had it. “I’ve been a collector all my life. When I was a kid, it was cigarette packets and old coins,” he says. His introduction to prints, which came via his future father-in-law, led to a desire to own original works. Nearly 50 years later, the Manchester-born entrepreneur has not looked back. “Every penny I’ve had has been put into art,” he says…

The portrait miniatures conservator who sees the bigger picture

If you ask Alan Derbyshire how he came to specialise in the conservation of portrait miniatures, he says it was “being in the right place at the right time”. He joined London’s Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A) as a paper conservator in 1983 and later spent two years training under the museum’s miniatures expert Jim Murrell. He assumed the role of the V&A’s go-to person for miniatures after Murrell’s death in 1994 and…

A 19th-century bikini from Iran goes on show in the UK in time for the summer

This bikini top, acquired by the “intrepid” Victorian traveller Ellen Tanner (1847-1937) during her tour of the Middle East in the 1890s, is among the more unusual objects conserved ahead of an exhibition of Tanner’s Middle Eastern art collection at the Holburne Museum in Bath, south-west England, (until 21 October). Tanner picked up the wool-and-silk embroidered garment in modern day Iran, as she made her way across the region on horseback with just two guides accompanying her. “She was perhaps only the second woman to travel to the Middle East on her own during that period,”…

Relic of first-century pope found in a rubbish tip is donated to Westminster Cathedral

A relic of Pope Clement I found by rubbish collectors in London has been donated to Westminster Cathedral. The bone fragment from the first-century pontiff, who was exiled by the Roman Emperor Trajan and martyred in Ukraine, is encased in a domed oval frame that may date to as early as the 17th century… 

The amazing technicolour Chippendale: museum injects colour back into 18th-century work

When you think of words synonymous with Chippendale, craftsmanship, brown, expensive and—dare we say it—even exotic dancers come to mind. Punchy colours like bubblegum pink, canary yellow and bright green are not what many associate with the 18th-century furniture maker who took Georgian Britain by storm… 

Gerda Steiner and Jörg Lenzlinger: Where the wild things are

What do tears, fitness machines, labyrinths, fertiliser crystals, secretaries, tree branches and meteorites have in common? Nothing, normally, but in the surreal worlds that the Swiss artists Gerda Steiner and Jörg Lenzlinger concoct, using natural and mass-produced objects, each has a role to play. For the exhibition Too Early to Panic, the Museum Tinguely is presenting labyrinthine installations that incorporate all these elements and much more…

Disco balls and whale watching: what caught our eye at Design Miami fair

If you have ever wondered what it is like to be inside the belly of a whale, now is your chance to find out—and it is for a good cause. The South African designer Porky Hefer has joined with the Leonardo DiCaprio Foundation and SFA Advisory to create works that draw attention to endangered wildlife. For his latest series, Hefer has used recycled materials such as t-shirts and water bottles to create five of his characteristic animal-form nests…

Mauritshuis invites visitors to watch conservators clean its oldest painting

For more than two decades, visitors to the Mauritshuis in The Hague have watched experts conserve and restore paintings by masters such as Johannes Vermeer and The Goldfinch painter Carel Fabritius. From 14 June, the public will again have the opportunity to see conservators in action, when two specialists embark on a project to clean the oldest work in the Dutch museum’s collection: The Lamentation of Christ (around 1460-64) by Rogier van der Weyden…

Why using lasers to clean feathers is not a bird-brained idea

What is the secret to cleaning centuries of dirt from a cape made from more than 5,300 feathers? Why lasers, of course. After learning that the Vatican Museums had used infrared lasers to clean some of its feathered works, conservators from Milan decided to try the method on this ceremonial cape made by the Tupinambá—a cannibalistic tribe from Brazil…

Canada’s 1950s Venice Biennale pavilion gets a facelift

A C$3m project to restore the Canadian pavilion and its surrounding landscape could change the way Venice Biennale visitors navigate the entire Giardini complex. The change of visitor flow through the park is an unexpected by-product of efforts to renovate the 1950s pavilion. The restored building and the exhibition, Canada Builds/Rebuilds a Pavilion in Venice, are due to…

Army helicopter paint used to restore outdoor sculptures

When City on the High Mountain (1983), a painted-steel sculpture by the late US artist Louise Nevelson, goes back on display outside the museum at the Storm King Art Center in Mountainville, New York, this summer, the US Army will have played a vital but unexpected hand in its restoration…

From Monet to Van Gogh: Factum Arte re-creates lost masterpieces for Sky Arts TV series

The biggest art heist in history, a Monet destroyed in a fire at one of the world’s top museums and an unflattering portrait of a prime minister used as kindling for a midnight bonfire are three of the stories presented in Mystery of the Lost Paintings, a television series that documents the creation of digital facsimiles of seven masterpieces lost during the 20th century because of fire, war or theft. The project is a collaboration…

One of Pope’s favourite paintings is looking refreshed after restoration

Visitors to Santa Maria Maggiore in Rome may notice that the Salus Populi Romani (Salvation of the Roman People), one of the church’s most beloved works of art—and a favourite of Pope Francis—is looking refreshed these days. This is thanks to the efforts of conservators from the Vatican Museums, who spent months working to restore the Byzantine-style icon of the Madonna and Child to its original splendour by…

The world’s most popular exhibition? Ancient sculptures in Tokyo versus Modern masters in Paris

The four-year-old Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris pulled off a major coup last year by welcoming more than 1.2 million people to see Impressionist and Modern works collected by the Russian industrialist Sergei Shchukin between 1898 and 1914. The first-class assemblage of pieces by Matisse, Picasso, Gauguin and Monet, among…

All tastes catered for in art collective GCC’s daytime talk show at Art Dubai

The eight-member GCC has certainly been busy in the five years since it formed at Art Dubai in 2013. Comprised of artists, designers, musicians, writers and architects with strong links to the Arabian Gulf region, GCC (a reference to the Gulf Cooperation Council) has, among other initiatives, held a highly productive summit in Switzerland, developed a brand identity for a fictitious Gulf nation complete with branded pens, and…

The jewel in the Tefaf Maastricht art fair’s crown

The jewellery trade is big business. Jewellery sales at Christie’s and Sotheby’s last year totalled more than $1bn (both auction houses reported sales of around $550m). Collectors, whether buying for pleasure or investment, are swotting up on the field and vying for top-notch pieces. Those keen to add to their collection may be spoiled for choice at Tefaf Maastricht with exhibitors such as Van Cleef & Arpels, Reza, Wallace Chan, Hemmerle, Glenn Spiro,…

Where petroleum exploration meets art: Researchers use terahertz scanning to understand artist’s methods

Researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology are taking technology used by geologists in petroleum exploration and applying it to the field of art conservation. Terahertz scanners and associated signal processing techniques are being used to look beneath the surface of works of art to gain insights into the methods used in their creation…

Are pastels the 18th century’s answer to Photoshop?

When the French artist Maurice-Quentin de La Tour exhibited his monumental portrait of the magistrate and banking heir Gabriel Bernard de Rieux at the Paris Salon of 1741, he clearly intended the painting to be a manifesto for pastels’ ability to compete with grand portraits executed in oil. At 6.5ft tall, the portrait is the largest pastel made in the 18th century …

Tate awarded $1.5m research grant to explore models to conserve contemporary works ‘that challenge the structure of the museum’

The Tate is embarking on a new project to develop new models for the conservation and management of contemporary art, particularly works “that challenge the structures of the museum” such as time-based media, digital and performance art. The initiative is supported by…

Best seat in the house at Design Miami

It is hard not to walk past this trio of furry armchairs, which refer to Goldilocks and the Three Bears, without cracking a smile. The in-demand French interior designer Pierre Yovanovitch, who recently debuted his furniture at New York’s R & Company, has put a 21st-century twist on a traditional form with the addition of sheepskin upholstery and perky ears—and the finely crafted chairs are also incredibly snug. “I can’t tell you how many people were surprised by how comfortable they are,” says…

Mika Rottenberg: Capitalism as you’ve never seen it before

The Argentinean-born, New York-based artist Mika Rottenberg’s surreal video installations seek to expose the hidden processes behind mass-produced, globally traded products in a way only Rottenberg can. From the production of cultured pearls (NoNoseKnows) or the millions of brightly coloured wholesale goods sold in a superstore in China (Cosmic Generator) to wet wipes literally made from the sweat of others (Tropical Breeze) or cheese produced by milking women’s hair (Cheese), her bizarre visual narratives feature…

Old Masters, new tricks: Conservators unearth century-old collection’s secrets

Many assume that once a collection, especially one comprised mostly of Old Master paintings, has graced a museum’s walls for a century, everything that can be learned already has. But an exhibition opening on 3 November at the Philadelphia Museum of Art turns that theory on its head…

Seattle set to get first Asian paintings conservation studio in western US

The Seattle Art Museum (SAM) has received a $3.5m challenge grant from the Mellon Foundation to establish an Asian paintings conservation centre at the Seattle Asian Art Museum (SAAM), which is part of SAM. The only studio to specialise in this area in the Western US, its opening in 2019 will coincide with the inauguration of SAAM’s renovated and expanded building…

UK’s Cultural Protection Fund makes headway in conflict zones

When the British Council, in co-operation with the Department for Digital, Media, Culture and Sport, was tasked with developing a fund for the protection of heritage in 12 conflict-affected countries in the Middle East and Africa, the desire was to “create something open and transparent that would not run the risk of becoming a pet project”, says Stephen Stenning, the council’s…

How Degas struggled with the art of letting go

Edgar Degas (1834-1917) obsessively reworked his canvases (sometimes even after they were sold, much to the perturbation of his buyers). The thorny question of what Degas considered to be a finished work of art is explored in an article in Facture, a biennial publication on conservation research produced by the National Gallery of Art…

Artist Alex Katz picks his highlights from Frieze Masters

Walking through Frieze Masters with Alex Katz is like stepping out with a rock star. Every few minutes, people stop the US artist to take his picture or tell him how much they admire his work. Katz, who turned 90 years young this year, is in town for the opening of his solo exhibition…

From Siberia with love: The Mysterious Scythians—tattoos and all—are brought to life at the British Museum

For an ancient civilisation that left no written records, we know a surprising amount about the Scythians. These nomadic people from Siberia inhabited a vast swathe of land from the edge of northern China to the northern Black Sea—an expanse that was twice the size of the mighty Persian Empire—from 900BC to 200BC. Much of what we know about the Scythians has been…

Rediscovered Mexican Old Master picture gets fresh look for Met show

When art history professor Barbara Mundy walked into Fordham University’s office of the president back in 2000, she says she “almost hit the floor” upon seeing an unrecognised painting by the 17th-century Mexican painter Cristóbal de Villalpando (around 1649-1714) hanging on the wall. Many of the artist’s pictures remain in Mexico and so finding Villalpando’s Adoration of the Magi (1683) in the Bronx came as a shock…

Cracked it! Getty exhibition unlocks the material secrets of Concrete art

Although art historians have written about the avant-garde artists working in Brazil and Argentina in the 1940s and 1950s, less is known about the technical details of their practice—that is, until recently. Specialists from the Getty Conservation Institute (GCI) and the Getty Research Institute (GRI) collaborated with the Colección Patricia Phelps de Cisneros on a pioneering, three-year study of 30 pieces of Concrete and Neo-Concrete art by artists…

Artists lead preservation efforts at California arts centre

For the past three decades, the Headlands Center for the Arts (HCA), an arts institution with a vibrant artist residency programme in the picturesque Marin Headlands recreational area north of San Francisco, has tasked artists with finding creative ways of rehabilitating the nine historic military buildings on its campus. While earlier preservation initiatives focused on the site’s early-1900s buildings, the latest $1.8m…

Royal Academy of Arts lifts Burlington Gardens veil with end of revamp in sight

Much of the scaffolding and the Yinka Shonibare-designed hoarding that has covered the Italianate façade of 6 Burlington Gardens in central London for more than a year is coming down this summer as the £50m redevelopment to create a cohesive two-acre campus by uniting the building with long-time home of the Royal Academy of Arts (RA), Burlington House, takes another step…

V&A celebrates the designers who made the most of plywood

It’s not every day that a drop tank from a 1942 De Havilland Mosquito aeroplane is brought into an art museum’s conservation studio, but that is precisely what conservators at London’s Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A) were confronted with in the run-up to the institution’s major exhibition on plywood—a material that is as versatile as it is ubiquitous. The show, due to open tomorrow (15 July), charts the rise of this humble material from the 1850s to today and features an eclectic…

Late artist Sidney Nolan’s undisturbed UK studio opens to the public

Before the studio could be opened to the public, the Australian conservator and Nolan specialist Paula Dredge was brought in to examine and conserve its contents. She was confronted by a huge stockpile of paint, particularly Ripolin, a commercial enamel paint that Nolan began…

French military funds technology to document heritage in conflict zones

The French ministry of defence is funding a US-French consortium that is working to democratise the technology used to digitally document heritage sites threatened by war. A $1.1m grant, announced last month, supports a three-year project to widen access to this 3D data…

Good things come in small packages at the Rijksmuseum

The Rijksmuseum is out to prove that good things really do come in small packages with its latest exhibition that explores the art of 16th-century Dutch microsculptures. Titled Small Wonders, the Amsterdam show features around 60 of the 130 extant examples of this unique art form. Expertly carved from boxwood, these micro-carvings, some of which are just 25mm in diameter, take the form of prayer beads (also known as prayer nuts), altarpieces, shrines, skulls and coffins… 

Fahrelnissa Zeid: the Modern Turkish artist who walked on her canvases

Fahrelnissa Zeid (1901-91) may well be one of the most fascinating artists you’ve never heard of—that is, until recently. An exhibition of the late Turkish artist that is due to open at Tate Modern and the recent of sale of her seriously large abstract painting Towards a Sky (1953) for just under £1m (nearly twice its low estimate) is generating a buzz both around Zeid’s work and her incredible life story, which has all the makings of a feature film…

Dutch museum’s entire Mondrian collection gets a health check

Every painting by Piet Mondrian (1872-1944) in the Gemeentemuseum’s collection has been scrutinised by conservators as part of the Dutch institution’s major Mondrian Restoration Project. The public is sure to reap the benefits of this initiative when the museum’s landmark… 

Who will win the race to lead Unesco?

The race to become the next director-general of Unesco is heating up as the candidates for the top job at the UN’s education and culture agency have undergone a round of interviews with the body’s executive board. In March, Unesco announced that nine nominees are in the running to replace Irina Bokova, who is due to step down…

A century of grime removed from scientific models in Manchester

Conservators from the Manchester Museum painstakingly removed a century of grime from around 25 objects used as life science teaching aids ahead of an exhibition opening this month that presents them as works of art…

Nations must co-ordinate efforts to protect heritage in the Middle East, says expert

Multinational collaborations are vital in the battle to preserve cultural heritage in conflict zones, says Zaki Aslan, the director of the ICCROM-ATHAR Regional Conservation Centre in Sharjah…

Giacometti’s Women of Venice sculptures restored and reunited for Tate Modern show

Bronze editions of Alberto Giacometti’s Women of Venice can be found in major museums across the world. But what happened to the six plaster originals, first shown in the French pavilion at the 1956 Venice Biennale, that were used to cast these bronzes?

How the artist Robert Rauschenberg got his goat

When the US artist and animal lover Robert Rauschenberg (1925-2008) saw a stuffed Angora goat in the window of a junk shop near his New York studio in 1955, he knew he had to have it. The shopkeeper wanted $35 for it, Rauschenberg paid $15 on account and, when Calvin Tomkins’s biography of the artist was published in 1980, he had yet to return to pay off the balance. The animal is a key component of his work Monogram (1955-59): a goat, standing on a painting…

Why art conservation needs to be left to the experts

News of a grandmother’s botched restoration of a 19th-century fresco in a small church in Borja, Spain, spread through the art world like wildfire this summer. Bloggers asked how this could have happened and what the chances are of it happening again elsewhere. Although the likelihood of a well-meaning member of the public walking into a prominent museum like London’s National Gallery, paintbrush in hand, ready to set to work on a Titian, is slim, what about works in small private collections that remain largely out of the public eye but may one day end up in a museum or national archive? 

Tefaf’s transplant takes root in New York

The European Fine Art Fair (Tefaf) returns to Manhattan just eight months after the New York spinoff’s launch by the Dutch stalwart in co-operation with Artvest Partners… 

Meet Idrimi, the British Museum’s 3,500-year-old Syrian refugee

A 3,500-year-old statue of a refugee from Aleppo that has not left the British Museum in nearly 80 years because of conservation concerns is now accessible to anyone with an internet connection. The London gallery collaborated with Factum Foundation to produce precise 3D renderings of the BM’s statue of Idrimi—a refugee from what is modern-day Syria who rose to be the king of Alalakh, in southern Turkey—using the latest…

Exhibition costs an arm and a leg—but in a good way

“The old repair looked horrendous—as if a child had rolled up a piece of Plasticine” is how Deborah Howard from the history of art department at the University of Cambridge describes an earlier attempt to restore a late Medieval maiolica statuette of the Virgin and Child that had lost two of its limbs. At some point in the past century, a restorer decided to recreate the Virgin’s missing arm and the Child’s lost leg. Unfortunately, the result looked more comical than spiritual…

‘Rediscovered’ Degas goes on show in London

Is this the original version of Edgar Degas’s Little Dancer Aged Fourteen exhibited at the sixth Impressionist show in Paris in 1881? The London dealer Guy Stair Sainty is convinced that it is and says that a growing number of scholars are coming around to the idea…

De Stijl factory gets a new lease of life in time for art movement’s centenary

The only industrial building designed by Gerrit Rietveld (1888-1964), the Dutch designer and architect associated with the De Stijl movement, sat empty for nearly a decade before its current owner bought it and set about bringing it back to life. Fast forward two years and…

Emperor’s collection of dodos and dragons to go on display at the Rijksmuseum

A collection of 750 remarkably well-preserved watercolours of plants and animals—both real and imaginary—assembled for Rudolf II, the Holy Roman Emperor from 1576 to 1612, is due to go on long-term loan to the Rijksmuseum in…

Photos of Guercino painting, rolled up like a rug by thieves, reveal extent of damage

The first photographs of the Guercino painting stolen from an Italian church in 2014, which was recently recovered in Casablanca, show the extent of damage to the work. Reports in the Italian and Moroccan press suggest that… 

French museum lifts the veil on Rodin work not previously exhibited

A sculpture by Auguste Rodin (1840-1917) is due to go on public display for the first time at the Musée Rodin in Paris this month, thanks to the efforts of conservators. Absolution (around 1900), an assemblage of three plaster sculptures with a piece of fabric draped over the top, is being… 

‘Lost’ Cubist painting found under later work

A “lost” Cubist painting has been found under an Art Brut work by the same artist. The discovery was made when Manuela de Kerchove d’Ousselghem, the granddaughter of the Belgian artist and art critic René Guiette (1893-1976), took her grandfather’s painting Paysage (1953) to…

Antwerp’s Axel Vervoordt Gallery opens ‘art village’ in former distillery

The Axel Vervoordt Gallery opens its new flagship space in a 19th-century distillery on the outskirts of Antwerp today, 8 March. The Kanaal gallery is in a mixed-use cultural and residential complex—a “city in the country” as it is described on its website—that the Axel Vervoordt Company has…

String theory: Spanish refugees inspired Henry Moore’s 1930s stringed sculptures

People tend to associate the British artist Henry Moore (1898-1986) with the monumental bronzes for which he is famous. Words such as tiny, purple and yellow do not immediately spring to mind, but that is precisely what visitors to the San Diego Museum of Art’s new interactive Visible Vaults…

It’s about time: NYU launches US first time-based media conservation graduate course

The Institute of Fine Arts (IFA) at New York University (NYU) is preparing to launch a four-year graduate course in time-based media conservation. The degree is the first of its kind in the US and reflects the growing need for specialists in the field as the popularity of technology-based works increases…

The Brueghel discovered in Bath museum’s storeroom

The recent conservation and technical examination of a picture from the Holburne Museum in Bath has confirmed that the painting is indeed a work by Pieter Brueghel the Younger (1564-1638) and not by a follower of the Flemish master as was previously thought…

MFA Boston to bring experts together with $24m overhaul of conservation centre

Construction of the revamped $24m conservation centre at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston is due to begin later this year. The museum plans to centralise six specialist areas of conservation by… 

Researchers burst Moholy-Nagy’s bubbles at the Guggenheim

The second wife of the Hungarian-born Bauhaus artist László Moholy-Nagy (1895-1946), Sibyl, wrote that her husband used their kitchen oven to heat sheets of plastic so they would bend and distort light better. So was he also responsible for the bubbles in some of his Plexiglas works—or were they just flaws in the manufacturing process that he used in his explorations of light, reflection and transparency? This was one of the questions…

Spot the horse: imaging technology reveals hidden secrets of Dutch Golden Age paintings

The Dutch Golden Age artist Pieter Jansz Saenredam (1597-1665) had a Medieval tale about a knight, a magical horse, a tyrannical emperor, brotherly love and the Crusades on his mind when he created The Choir of the Saint Bavo in Haarlem (1636). This new information is only known because infrared reflectography (IRR) was used to peek beneath the paint layers …

Sydney Opera House roof gets special soundcheck

One million brilliant white tiles clad the 65m-tall precast concrete roof of the 43-year-old Sydney Opera House—Jørn Utzon’s Modernist tour de force overlooking the Australian city’s harbour. The glazed ceramic tiles need to be hand-checked, or tapped, every five years by specialist engineers, who abseil down the roof “sails” looking for changes in their sound or appearance. Now, thanks to the combined efforts of the opera house, the Getty Foundation, the University of…

The year in heritage: digital scanning promises a brave new world

Earlier this year, archaeologists (as well as every 40-year-old whose childhood dream was to be the next Indiana Jones) were thrown into wild excitement when radar scans revealed that Tutankhamun’s tomb may contain a secret chamber. The discovery gave credence to a theory that Nefertiti—the chief consort of Tutankhamun’s father—is buried in the concealed room. Although a follow-up examination drew contradictory conclusions that require further…

Prada boss says private firms must chip in to restore Italian heritage damaged in quakes

The chief executive of the Italian brand Prada, Patrizio Bertelli, used the unveiling of Giorgio Vasari’s newly restored Last Supper (1543) in the presence of the Italian president, Sergio Mattarella, to urge private companies to support the restoration of cultural heritage that was damaged in the recent earthquakes in central Italy. “We must not forget that the State is us…

50th anniversary of the Florence Flood: Memories from a drowned world

Asking a veteran conservator or museum professional where they were when the Arno River burst its banks 50 years ago this month, submerging the historic centre of Florence under 18 billion gallons of filthy water, is akin to asking someone what they were doing when Neil Armstrong walked on the moon. The flood was a pivotal moment in the history of conservation…

Restorers use Japanese algae and sturgeon glue to treat Futurist work

Automobile Speed + Light + Noise (around 1913), a painting by the Italian Futurist Giacomo Balla (1871-1958), is due to go back on display at the Kunsthaus Zurich in Switzerland in November following a six-month stint in the museum’s restoration studio…

Child portrait revealed to be work by Goya’s brother-in-law

Research into an 18th-century Spanish portrait acquired recently by the Meadows Museum in Dallas has led scholars to conclude that it is a work by Francisco Bayeu y Subías (1734-95), the court painter to Charles III and brother-in-law of fellow artist Francisco Goya. The painting, which had been in a private collection and exhibited just twice in the past 80 years, was long thought to be by Bayeu’s mentor, Anton Raphael Mengs…

Tefaf art fair makes New York debut

You might have guessed that the first edition of The European Fine Art Fair (Tefaf), which opens to VIPs in New York today, would be no ordinary affair. “Tefaf New York is more than just a fair; it’s a cultural event, a cultural happening,” says Michael Plummer, who is organising the two US editions—in autumn (22-26 October) and spring (4-9 May 2017)—with his Artvest partner Jeff Rabin. They are working with the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Frick Collection and the… 

Croatian heritage has a friend in Britain

Haunting photographs of heritage sites caught in the crossfire of the war in Croatia were shown at an exhibition that opened in London on 3 December 1991—three days before the shelling of Dubrovnik brought the crisis to the world’s attention. Images taken by the photographer Pavo Urban, who was killed while capturing the destruction on Dubrovnik’s main street…

Concrete-encased Cadillac stops traffic in Chicago

A procession that includes a fleet of classic Cadillacs and a concrete truck will be on hand to celebrate the return to the University of Chicago campus of “the largest and most ambitious Fluxus object in existence”, says Christine Mehring, the chair of the university’s art history department. Concrete Traffic (1970), a public art piece by the German Fluxus artist Wolf Vostell (1932-98) that is comprised of a 1957 Cadillac encased in 14 tonnes of concrete…

Curtain rises on Buddha restoration in Boston

From now until January 2017, entry to the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, includes a performance, a ballet of sorts, starring conservators and one very big 300-year-old Buddhist painting. Visitors can watch the restoration of The Death of the Historical Buddha (1713), a 16ft-tall scroll made by the Osaka-born painter, calligrapher and poet Hanabusa Itcho (1652-1724), in a temporary conservation studio…

Rodin’s working methods revealed as his dancers give up their secrets

It is no secret that Auguste Rodin (1840-1917) was an early advocate of recycling. One only has to look at versions of his monumental sculptural work The Gates of Hell in the collections of the Musée d’Orsay in Paris, the Kunsthaus Zurich and Mexico’s Museo Soumaya to find some familiar faces lurking among the 200 figures that make up the work. The Thinker—one of the French sculptor’s most recognisable pieces—occupies a prominent position towards the top of the Gates…

All aboard the Mary Rose: Henry VIII’s fully restored warship opens to the public

Today (19 July)—471 years to the day when the Mary Rose sank with 500 crew on board—the barriers erected during the vessel’s conservation to separate the ship from the public will come down. That people can actually visit the vessel—Henry VIII’s prized warship sunk by the French, just 2km from Portsmouth Harbour, during the Battle of the Solent in 1545—along with its amazing contents is quite extraordinary…

Wake-up call: climate change is serious threat to our heritage

On 26 May, US Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump vowed to focus on “real environmental challenges, not phony ones”, cancel the US’s participation in the global Paris Agreement on climate change and “stop all payments of US tax dollars to UN global warming programmes”. That same day, Unesco released a report showing how climate change is becoming one of the most significant risks to heritage sites. As if on cue, three days later the River Seine reached a 30-year high, flooding areas of Paris…

MoMA breathes life into Bruce Conner’s gas chamber sculpture

Conservators at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York have done the seemingly impossible: they have brought Bruce Conner’s CHILD (1959-60), a haunting sculpture of a gas chamber execution, back from the dead ahead of a major travelling exhibition. Conner (1933-2008) made the work, a black-wax figure of a boy—its head thrown back and mouth open as if screaming—covered with nylon webbing and strapped to a high-chair, in response to the planned execution of Caryl Chessman…

When disasters strike, keep calm and conserve

The theme for the joint conference of the American Institute for Conservation of Historic and Artistic Works (AIC) and the Canadian Association for Conservation of Cultural Property (CAC) couldn’t have been more spot on. As 1,400 conservators, archivists and museum professionals met in Montreal to discuss preparing for disasters and the unexpected in conservation, a massive wildfire raged 3,800km away in Alberta. Early estimates suggest…

Silk Road leads to Los Angeles as Getty show recreates Mogao Grottoes

The Mogao Grottoes, a collection of more than 500 ancient Buddhist temples carved into the cliffs near Dunhuang in north-western China, were a key stop for the intrepid travellers who exchanged goods and information on the Silk Road—the ancient equivalent of the information superhighway. Dunhuang was one of the first trading cities in China encountered by Western merchants, and the final supply stop for…

New light shed on craftsmen who captured sea life in glass

For more than 70 years, the Dresden-based father and son glassblowers Leopold (1822-95) and Rudolf Blaschka (1857-1939) churned out thousands of intricate models of botanical and marine specimens for international universities and museums. In the 1880s, Cornell University in upstate New York was quick to snap up a collection of 577 marine invertebrates. Today, much of this is in storage because of its fragile…

British Museum dips its toes into world of underwater archaeology

Hundreds of objects swallowed up by the sea more than a millennium ago are going on show in the British Museum’s first exhibition on underwater archaeology. The London show, which opens this week, explores the rich history of interactions between the Egyptians and the Greeks. It presents 300 artefacts, around 200 of which were found off the coast of Egypt within the past 20 years by a team from…

Twist of fate leads to new finds in Tutankhamun’s tomb

The archaeological community was thrown into a state of wild excitement in March, when Egyptian officials announced the results of new investigations into the tomb of Tutankhamun that could lead to “the discovery of the century”. Radar scans of the tomb show two hidden rooms behind the chamber’s north and west walls..

Pioneering cleaning method brings Flemish tapestry back into sharp focus

Long-time visitors to the Worcester Art Museum in Massachusetts are celebrating the return of an old favourite (a 511-year-old one, to be precise) with a fresh look and a new attribution after its two-year treatment at a leading textile restoration firm 5,600km away. As we went to press, a huge Flemish tapestry of the Last Judgment, made in Brussels in around 1505…

Nepal earthquake anniversary: World Monuments Fund to finance rebuilding of Char Narayan Temple

April marks the first anniversary of the deadly 7.8 magnitude earthquake that rocked Nepal, killing more than 9,000 people and toppling some of the Himalayan country’s most beloved cultural heritage sites. As the Nepalese government continues to face criticism for the slow pace of the country’s reconstruction, Nepal’s prime minister Khadga Prasad Oli announced today…

Like day and night: Joseph Wright works go back on display in Derby after restoration

Colosseum by Daylight and Colosseum by Moonlight, the last two surviving paintings of the ancient Roman amphitheatre by Joseph Wright of Derby (1734-97) will go on show for the first time in 56 years on Saturday 23 April, following their recent restoration funded by the Pilgrim Trust. An earlier, poor intervention that masked much of the artist’s hand had made the pair unfit for display at the Derby Museum and Art Gallery in Derbyshire…

Race to digitise photographs chronicling the birth of Bangladesh

In an age when the risks faced by wartime photojournalists have become all too apparent, two Dutch organisations are joining forces with a Dhaka-based picture agency to preserve the photography archive of Rashid Talukder (1939-2011), who is known for his defining images of Bangladesh’s struggle for independence from Pakistan. The award-winning photographer…

Top five London gardens designed by Capability Brown

England is celebrating its most famous landscape architect Lancelot “Capability” Brown (1716-83) this year, with events staged across the country to mark the tercentenary of his birth. But you don’t necessarily have to go traipsing out to the countryside to places such as Blenheim Palace, Harewood House or Warwick Castle to see evidence of the British landscape designer’s work—he is associated with around 37 gardens in Greater London…

Getty stabilises Tutankhamun’s tomb paintings

As the news broke in March that recent radar scans had revealed two hidden chambers in the tomb of Tutankhamun, conservators from the Los Angeles-based Getty Conservation Institute (GCI), working with staff from Egypt’s Supreme Council of Antiquities (SCA), had just finished a five-and-a-half-week campaign to stabilise the tomb’s 3,500-year-old wall paintings. The Getty project is part of a long-term initiative that aims to serve as a model for future conservation projects…

Visitor Figures 2015: Jeff Koons is the toast of Paris and Bilbao

Matisse cut-outs in New York, Monet landscapes in Tokyo and Picasso paintings in Rio de Janeiro were overshadowed in 2015 by attendance at nine shows organised by the National Palace Museum in Taipei. The eclectic group of exhibitions topped our annual survey despite the fact that…  

British Museum’s collection to go under the microscope

The British Museum announced today the launch of a stand-alone department for scientific research, thanks to support from the Wellcome Trust. Formerly part of the London institution’s conservation department, its separation signals the museum’s intention to grow this area so that more of its cutting-edge research into its permanent collection can be shared with the public through online initiatives and exhibitions…  

Venice is Europe’s most endangered heritage site, watchdog warns

The Venice Lagoon is the most endangered heritage site in Europe, declared the pan-European heritage organisation Europa Nostra at an event today, 16 March, in Venice. Fifty years after the great floods in Florence and Venice mobilised the international community into action, the group, in collaboration with the European Investment Bank Institute, appealed to European, Italian and Venetian governments…

Medieval building adjacent to Hieronymus Bosch’s original studio collapses during his 500th anniversary year celebrations

A Medieval building that was supposed to serve as the canvas for Bosch by Night, a lightshow commissioned as part of the year-long celebrations to mark the quincentenary of Hieronymus Bosch’s death, collapsed on 27 February—days before the project’s launch in the artist’s hometown of Den Bosch in The Netherlands. But the show will go on… 

In a barn in deepest France, something stirs

A group of dealers are joining forces to make tribal art more accessible to customers who live outside Paris, Brussels and London—the traditional European centres of the trade. At the first edition of the Bourgogne Tribal Art Show (26-29 May), around 25 dealers will show African, Oceanic, Eskimo, North American Indian, Pre-Columbian and Southeast Asian works in a converted barn in the tiny village of Besanceuil…

Canadian dealer fights to raise the profile of Native American art

It’s 40 years since the Canadian dealer Donald Ellis founded his gallery dedicated to Native American art in New York. The leader in this highly specialist field, Ellis has sold pieces to most of the prominent institutions in the US, as well as to representatives of the Musée du Quai Branly, Paris. Ahead of showing at the Armory Show in New York (3-6 March 2016), he talks to The Art Newspaper about why his area deserves more attention—and how the “religion” that is contemporary art isn’t helping anyone.

Who is making Land Art now?

The vast expanses of the American Southwest became the preferred canvas for a group of artist-­explorers, who, from the late 1960s, traded the confines of the traditional gallery space for a literally groundbreaking type of art carved directly into the landscape. Although it was a global phenomenon, with artists such as the UK’s Richard Long creating land pieces at around the same time, it is the works in the US—such as Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty, a 1,500ft-long mud and rock piece in Utah’s Great Salt Lake, and the awe-inspiring Double Negative…

Mummy dearest, I need to make another teeny alteration…

New research into a set of 3,000-year-old Egyptian coffins at the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge has scholars scratching their heads about the booming funerary industry in ancient Egypt. An examination of the sarcophagi of Nespawershefyt (also known as Nes-Amun) has revealed that significant changes were made…

Armchair archaeologists reveal details of life in ancient Egypt

People around the world are helping to transcribe more than a half-million ancient documents from the comfort of their sitting rooms, thanks to a major crowd-sourcing project that is revolutionising our understanding of life in Greco-Roman Egypt and how scholars sift through vast quantities of archaeological material… 

Restoration gives British Museum’s Amitabha Buddha a reason to smile

The 1,400-year-old Amitabha Buddha, one of the star pieces of a landmark exhibition of Chinese art held at London’s Royal Academy of Arts in 1935 and a highlight of the British Museum’s collection for nearly eight decades, has undergone its first full conservation treatment in 25 years thanks to funds from Bank of America Merrill Lynch…

Fresh look for Australian landscape that defined a nation

The North Wind by the much-loved Australian artist Frederick McCubbin (1855-1917) has a fresh look and a new date, thanks to a restoration and conservation project undertaken by Melbourne’s National Gallery of Victoria, in collaboration with the Australian Synchrotron scientific research centre. This painting, as well as others by McCubbin of stoic pioneers braving the elements, were key in helping to define Australia’s national identity….

British Library puts giant royal atlas online

The British Library in London is a quarter of the way through a major project to re-catalogue, digitise and conserve a 50,000-strong map collection assembled by Britain’s famous collector-king, George III (1738-1820). Among the objects to be digitally photographed is the world’s second largest atlas, which measures a huge 1.8m by 2.3m. The Klencke Atlas, named after the Dutch sugar merchant Johannes Klencke…

The story behind the reattributed drawing by Hieronymus Bosch

A drawing that was once considered to be too much in the style of Hieronymus Bosch (around 1450-1516) to be by the artist’s own hand has been upgraded to an authentic work by the Dutch master. Infernal Landscape depicts hellish scenes including people being fed to a hungry monster via a waterwheel, and tiny figures straddling a large blade that has been plunged into the head of a man stuffed into a basket…

Celebrated director of World Monuments Fund retires

When Bonnie Burnham joined the World Monuments Fund (WMF) in 1985, the private, non-profit organisation dedicated to preserving the world’s heritage sites was long in spirit and ambition, but lean in means and reach. During her tenure as president and chief executive, Burnham has transformed the fund into a global conservation powerhouse…

United Nations celebrates female Arab muralists

The leading Saudi Arabian artist Ahmed Mater is working with his mother, his sister and a host of other artists and cultural historians to draw attention to a centuries-old Saudi tradition of house painting by women that is at risk of dying out. This week, a group of female Asiri artisans from the village of Rijal Alma, where Mater was raised, painted two large-scale murals for an exhibition at the United Nations’ headquarters in New York…

Tintoretto’s Venetian masterpieces sparkle again

Visitors to the 16th-century Scuola Grande di San Rocco in Venice, home to a spectacular cycle of wall and ceiling paintings by Tintoretto, are now able to view these masterpieces in a new light—literally. The 25 pictures in the Sala Superiore are being transformed by a project to clean centuries’ worth of grime from the sculpted marble that surrounds them, while a new LED lighting system has been installed in the Sala dell’Albergo…

Paris Tableau fair dips into Modern period by offering works by Courbet and Moret

Les Chaumes en Guidel, a striking picture painted in 1891 by Paul Gauguin’s protégé Henry Moret, would not have been on show at previous editions of Paris Tableau. For the fifth edition of the Old Masters fair, which opened yesterday, 11 November, and runs until 15 November, organisers extended the cut-off date of works on display from 1850 to 1900…   

Paris Tableau fair visitors help buy painting for Musée des Beaux-Arts, Lyon

The Musée des Beaux-Arts in Lyon added a significant 19th-century painting by Claudius Jacquand to its collection yesterday thanks to an impromptu fundraising drive at the VIP opening of the fifth edition of Paris Tableau, the Old Masters fair held at the Palais Brongniart. Around €16,000 was raised within two hours to buy the painting A Soldier Being Cared for by a Nun in a Cloister…

We’ll store your artefacts, US tells Syrian museums

As Isil destroys ancient temples and monuments across Syria and Iraq, the Association of Art Museum Directors (AAMD) is encouraging US museums to act as safe havens for threatened works of art in the collections of governments, museums and private individuals in conflict zones. But there are concerns that looted artefacts could be among the works sent to the US…

MoMA unveils film classics restored to former glory

Around 75 newly restored films, several of which have not been shown in the US before, will be screened in New York this month at the Museum of Modern Art’s 13th annual International Festival of Film Preservation. The museum, which boasts a 30,000-strong collection of films, has long been a champion of cinema. Its To Save and Project event presents an eclectic mix of long-lost silent comedies, early hand-coloured films, classics by legendary directors such as Federico Fellini…

Have mummies, will travel

Hair styled in short, tight curls similar to cuts favoured by French film stars, wax figurines of gods, embalming tools left inside the body, evidence of tuberculosis and, in some cases, even the sex of the mummified individual—details that might have remained hidden had the Field Museum in Chicago not brought in a mobile CT scanner to examine a number of Egyptian and Peruvian mummies from its store… 

When the West went crazy for all things Asian

So many fashionable Dutch students wore the “japonse rok”—a type of dressing gown often associated with the kimono—in the mid-18th century that seeing young, robed figures carousing in the streets was a regular occurrence. But to the less cultured outsider, this was still a strange sight. One such visitor to Leiden was convinced that an epidemic must have struck the city’s youth after he spotted several students wearing pyjamas around town…

Welcome to our kunstkammer: Our favourites from Frieze Masters fair

This 18th-century French mannequin, on offer with Kunstkammer Georg Laue, is made of wood, iron, bronze, leather and cork. A similar mannequin, once owned by the French artist Louis-François Roubiliac and now in the collection of the Museum of London, was shown in the recent exhibition on artists’ mannequins organised by the Fitzwilliam Museum….

Getty seeks to preserve memory of Palmyra’s Roman ruins through acquisition of rare photography collection

The Los Angeles-based Getty Research Institute has acquired a collection of some of the earliest photographs of Beirut, Lebanon and Syria, including images of the Roman ruins at the beleaguered ancient city of Palmyra—a Unesco World Heritage Site caught in the crossfire of the on-going Syrian Civil War…

‘This war is worse than the Mongol invasion’

Cynthia Finlayson, one of the last Western archaeologists to leave Syria as the political situation in the country deteriorated, has spoken to The Art Newspaper about the ongoing damage at the ancient site of Palmyra… 

Gainsborough’s House launches fundraising campaign

The trustees of Gainsborough’s House, the childhood home of Thomas Gainsborough (1727-88) that became a museum in 1961, are hoping that a proposed extension will help to put the institution and the market town of Sudbury, in Suffolk, on the international art museum map.  The UK museum wants to acquire an adjacent property, which will be demolished to create… 

The Getty: 30 years of changing the world

People normally associate the Getty with its large collection of antiquities and Medieval and Renaissance manuscripts, its fine paintings collection—mostly Old Masters rounded out with key later pictures such as Van Gogh’s Irises (1889)—and its substantial holdings of decorative art objects. Absent from this list are Modern and contemporary works of art. Considering this, one may be surprised to learn that…

Satellite image confirms Isil’s destruction of Palmyra’s Temple of Bel

Reports that Isil militants had destroyed a second ancient temple at Palmyra over the weekend have been confirmed by satellite images taken by the United Nations (UN). An image posted on the Twitter account of Unosat, the UN’s satellite operational satellite applications programme, shows the extent of damage to the 2,000-year-old Temple of Bel…

Isil beheads archaeologist in Palmyra

Isil militants have beheaded one of Syria’s most respected archaeologists and an expert on the ancient Roman city of Palmyra. Khaled Al-Asaad, who was director of antiquities at the Unesco World Heritage Site from 1963 to 2003, was murdered on 18 August and his body tied to an ancient column within the 2,000-year-old archaeological site. The 81-year-old archaeologist oversaw activities at the site for 40 years until his retirement in 2003…

Aristocrat unveils £1m multiverse land art by Charles Jencks

Richard Scott, the tenth Duke of Buccleuch, is turning a negative into a positive with a massive regeneration project in Scotland’s Southern Uplands. Faced with the need to clean up a 55-acre site scarred by open-cast coal mining, the Duke has transformed the landscape into a park, complete with a vast, cosmic land work by the US architect and land artist Charles Jencks…

Restoration work on Timbuktu’s historic tombs to finish this month

A project to restore 14 historic mausoleums destroyed in Timbuktu three years ago by hardline Islamists is due to finish at the end of July. The news was announced in Bonn, Germany, at the 39th session of Unesco’s World Heritage Committee. Extremist groups targeted the tombs of Muslim saints as well as the city’s vast libraries when rebels occupied northern Mali following a military coup in March 2012…

Joseph Beuys and the case of the moth-eaten suit

For the past 20 years, a felt suit by Joseph Beuys in the Tate in London has existed in a state of limbo: no longer part of the collection, the piece—or what remains of it—lives on in the institution’s archive. “The Felt Suit [1970] by Joseph Beuys is completely destroyed. [It] was always meant to be a suit in perfect order, without any wear and tear. It is, unfortunately, a total loss,” wrote Heiner Bastian, the late German artist’s personal secretary… 

Terrorists attack ancient Egyptian temple in Luxor

Three terrorists were shot today near the entrance to the ancient Egyptian temple of Karnak in Luxor following a failed attempt to carry out an attack at the popular tourist site. Early reports suggest that police killed at least two of the three terrorists, including a suicide bomber whose explosive was detonated in the assault. It is not immediately clear how many bystanders were hurt…

‘You must guard your own henhouse and often from your own foxes’

The old saying that every good book or manuscript has probably been stolen at least once was repeated throughout the conference Written Heritage of Mankind in Peril: Theft, Retrieval, Sale and Restitution of Rare Books, Maps and Manuscripts, held in London at the British Library on 26 June… 

The painting Saul and David reattributed to Rembrandt

Saul and David—a painting once thought to be one of Rembrandt’s greatest pictures until it was dismissed in 1969 as a work by a follower—has been reattributed to the Dutch master following a lengthy investigation. The Hague’s Mauritshuis revealed the news today, 9 June, in the run-up to the opening of an exhibition detailing the painting’s extensive technical investigation and recent restoration. The CSI-style show…

Lacma’s conservators discover 1960s colours in Ottoman interior

The restoration and conservation of the 18th-century Damascene reception room at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (Lacma) is likely to change our view of what these late Ottoman interiors would have looked like in their original state, says Linda Komaroff, the curator and head of the museum’s Middle East department…

Nepal mourns and prepares to rebuild after heritage is destroyed in deadly quake

Sushil Koirala, the prime minister of Nepal, is appealing to aid organisations and the international community for $2bn to help rebuild after two major earthquakes rocked the small Himalayan nation on 25 April and 12 May. The number of dead had reached 8,583 as… 

Grand designs on Sir John Soane’s London home

The second phase of a £7m project to restore Sir John Soane’s house in London to the state in which the English architect left it when he died is due to finish in May with the opening of his private apartments. From 19 May, visitors to the museum will able to tour a suite of rooms that have been closed to the public for 160 years…

Research puts Goya’s witches in right order

All known drawings from Francisco Goya’s private “Witches and Old Women” album are being presented in their original sequence, thanks to extensive technical research undertaken by conservators, curators and art historians. An exhibition at the Courtauld Gallery in London (until 25 May) marks the first time that all 22 ink drawings, which include depictions of elderly women fighting and witches carrying babies on their backs, have been shown…

Turkey plans to make a splash with new underwater museum

The Turkish ministry of culture has approved plans to create an underwater museum out of the ruins of an early Byzantine-era basilica discovered last year in a lake in the Bursa province, reports Hurriyet Daily. Researchers are currently surveying the site and carrying out preparatory works to transform…

Bode museum finally lays bare its war-damaged collection

Works damaged in two devastating fires in 1945 that destroyed around 400 paintings and sculptures stored in Berlin’s Friedrichshain bunker, including pieces by Rubens and Donatello, are being presented in a show at the Bode that explores ethical and practical decisions museums face in regards to war-damaged works, namely whether they should be restored or left in their ruined state as a permanent reminder of the horrors of the conflict…

V&A gallery reopens after conservators work on 19th-century plaster casts

The Victoria and Albert Museum in London last month celebrated the reopening of its newly renamed Weston Cast Court after an ambitious project to conserve the casts and restore the gallery to its original Victorian splendour. Missing, but not missed, from the festivities was a century’s worth of dirt, which conservators spent two years painstakingly removing from around 60 casts, including those of Ghiberti’s five-metre-tall bronze doors from the Baptistery in Florence and Michelangelo’s David, 1501-04….

Taipei museum takes visitor attendance top spot with loans from China

Dutch Old Masters from the Mauritshuis, the Hague, on the Tokyo leg of a world tour topped our international survey of exhibitions in 2012. In 2013, the top two paying shows were again in Asia. In Taipei, loans of ancient gold, jade and bronze artefacts from mainland China…

V&A detectives crack Meissen mystery

For decades, the bulk of the 150 fragments that form an 18th-century Meissen table fountain languished in cupboards in London’s Victoria and Albert Museum. Now, thanks to a mix of cutting-edge science and old-fashioned detective work, the white porcelain ensemble—one of the finest Meissen groups in existence—is being reconstructed…

Tate finds 370-year-old bullet hole in Charles I statue

An unexpected discovery was made at Tate Britain in London last month when staff unpacked a 17th-century gilded-bronze statue of Charles I, on loan from Winchester Cathedral. Conservators discovered a 370-year-old musket-ball hole in the body of the figure, near the orb held in the monarch’s outstretched hand. Another musket-ball hole, in the king’s leg, is clearly visible and… 

Art and the appetite for destruction: Histories of British Iconoclasm at Tate Britain

“I got five lovely shots in,” the suffragette Mary Richardson, also known as “Slasher Mary”, proudly recalled in an interview with the BBC in 1961. She was referring to the fateful day in March 1914 when, after milling around London’s National Gallery for hours, she removed a meat cleaver pinned inside her sleeve and set upon Velázquez’s The Toilet of Venus (Rokeby Venus), 1647-51. She remembers feeling lucky to get in a few more blows as…

The race to digitise the world’s heritage

CyArk, a US non-profit organisation dedicated to digitally preserving the world’s cultural heritage, has archived data from around 100 sites to date—from the ancient cities of Pompeii, Thebes and Chichén Itzá to prominent 20th-century landmarks such as Mount Rushmore in South Dakota and the Sydney Opera House…

Cold War spy photos help locate archaeological sites across the globe

A $275,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities will enable American academics to expand a mapping project, which uses Cold War-era spy satellite images to pinpoint archaeological sites, to include Western China, the Indus Valley, Africa, Eastern Europe and parts of Southeast Asia…

Libyan shrines under attack as militant Islamists target Muslim mausoleums

A wave of attacks on Muslim shrines in Libya has led to violent clashes between ultra-conservative Islamists and locals trying to protect the holy sites. As we went to press, three people had been killed and several others wounded in the town of Rajma, 50km from Benghazi, when extremists attempted to destroy the mausoleum of…

Daily Newspapers at Art Fairs

A series of live newspapers written and produced by on-the-ground teams at major art fairs in London, Basel, Dubai, Hong Kong, New York, Los Angeles, and Miami Beach. In my role as Fairs and Special Reports Editor, I served as the editorial project manager and often co-editor of these daily publications that were packed with breaking news, artist and collector interviews, exclusive artist posters and artist-designed mastheads, gossip, features, market analysis, book reviews, op-eds, and visitor guides to must-see exhibitions and events.

Annual Report on the Number of Visitors to the World’s Top Art Exhibitions and Museums

The Art Newspaper‘s flagship report on museum and exhibition visitation. We surveyed hundreds of museums annually for the special report that was picked up by major news outlets such as The Guardian and the BBC.

The Year Ahead

An annual art lover’s guide to the must-see exhibitions, biennials and triennials, art fairs, and new museums opening across the globe. Features previews of shows and events as well as comprehensive listings.