Paul Signac’s Le Port de La Rochelle was lifted from a museum in 2018 and found a year later by Kviv police in an unconnected raid
A Ukrainian man has gone on trial in France accused of masterminding the theft of a €1.5m (£1.3m) painting discovered in a house in Kyiv a year after it disappeared from a museum in Nancy.
The work by Paul Signac, Le Port de La Rochelle, went missing from the Musée de Beaux-Arts in Nancy, north-east France, in 2018.
Continue reading...Piece acquired by English painter in antiques shop in 1960s has been confirmed as lost work by Italian sculptor
Sometimes a hunch pays off, and when the English painter John Craxton recognised a work of genius for sale in a London antiques shop, he made very much the right call.
Craxton parted with £250 for an unusual chandelier he suspected was by the great sculptor Alberto Giacometti. Now that chandelier, made in the late 1940s, may sell at Christie’s in a few weeks’ time for as much as £7m. Pieces by the revered Swiss artist are the most expensive sculptures to buy at auction, and his work regularly breaks saleroom records.
Continue reading...House of the Vettii features ornate and erotic friezes – and a fresco of the god Priapus with a huge phallus
An ornate house – containing a fresco featuring a huge phallus – that was owned by two freed men freed from slavery in the ancient city of Pompeii has reopened to the public.
The House of the Vettii was buried by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in AD74 before being rediscovered in a largely preserved state during excavations in the late 19th century.
Continue reading...One of Tokyo’s most famous buildings was dismantled in April due to asbestos fears. Now 23 of the capsules have been saved for posterity
Tatsuyuki Maeda had more reason than most to feel a pang of regret as he joined admirers and passing office workers to watch Nakagin Capsule Tower being dismantled.
The building was not just one of Tokyo’s most famous structures; for more than a decade it had been Maeda’s occasional home – a pied-à-terre in the heart of the city he had coveted since he first set eyes on it from his nearby workplace.
Continue reading...Brian May and Grayson Perry are knighted, Denise Lewis is made a dame and Frank Skinner becomes MBE
The fashion designer Mary Quant, the Lionesses and the Queen guitarist Brian May are among those recognised in the first new year honours of the king’s reign.
Quant, 92, who as one of the most influential fashion figures in the swinging 60s popularised the miniskirt and hot pants, becomes a Companion of Honour, one of the top honours.
Continue reading...Story of Igor Pedin’s escape from Mariupol is one of about a dozen in an exhibition entitled What Would You Take?
The secret to Igor Pedin’s survival had been his invisibility, the 61-year-old had said.
With his dog, Zhu-Zhu, the former ship’s cook banked on being ignored by the trigger-happy Russian soldiers and their killing machines when he took the first step of a 140-mile journey from his home in the besieged Ukrainian port city of Mariupol on 23 April, before stealing out into the badlands of Russian-occupied territories towards the relative safety in the city of Zaporizhzhia.
Continue reading...Even oldest resident, aged 100, strips off in venture aimed at revitalising village in Murcia
For decades they’ve grappled with a steady exodus as residents set their sights on jobs and opportunities beyond the southern Spanish hamlet. But the dwindling population of Peña Zafra de Abajo may have found a singular strategy to fight back – in essence stripping down to save their town.
“When I suggested the idea of a nude calendar, people said, ‘Are you crazy?’” said Lucía Nicolás, who leads the hamlet’s residents’ association. “But I saw it as a way to put ourselves on the map and show off our hamlet of 16 residents.”
Continue reading...Ghanaian photographer’s crowdfunded project won support of Humans of New York author and boasts more than 30,000 books
The largest photography library in Africa has opened in Ghana’s capital, Accra, showcasing the work of the continent and diaspora’s forgotten, established and emerging talent.
Founded by Ghanaian photographer and film-maker Paul Ninson, the Dikan Center houses more than 30,000 books he has collected. The first of its kind in Ghana, a photo studio and classrooms provide space for workshops while a fellowship programme is aimed at African documentarians and visual artists. An exhibition space will host regular shows, the first of which is Ahennie, a series by the late Ghanaian documentary photographer Emmanuel Bobbie (also known as Bob Pixel), who died in 2021.
Continue reading...Three 2,500-year-old pieces will be ‘donated’ to Greece’s Archbishop Ieronymos II amid wider conversation about future of Parthenon marbles held by Britain
Pope Francis has decided to return to Greece three 2,500-year-old pieces of the Parthenon that have been in the papal collections of the Vatican Museums for two centuries.
The Vatican said in a brief statement that the pope was giving them to Archbishop Ieronymos II, the head of the Greek Orthodox Church and Greece’s spiritual leader, as a “donation” and “a concrete sign of his sincere desire to follow in the ecumenical path of truth”.
Continue reading...Show takes a deep dive into story of 1922 film that spawned an entire genre – with free entry for blood donors
It was a nightmare born out of a pandemic: a silent killer that arrived from a faraway land, rapidly spreading a delirious fever across the domestic population and leaving its hosts in an anaemic stupor.
By channelling contemporary fears around infectious diseases in the wake of the 1918-20 influenza pandemic, the 1922 expressionist masterpiece Nosferatu founded an entire genre of vampire horror movies and inspired claw-fingered monsters that would spook generations to come, from Freddy Krueger to the Babadook.
Continue reading...Eric Tucker, self-taught and virtually unknown until his death in 2018, has since been compared to LS Lowry
It is the cluttered front room of a Warrington council house: gas fire set into a tiled surround, glass-fronted cabinet housing treasured knick-knacks; shoes tucked under a chair; magazines and books piled up. And in the middle, an easel, surrounded by tubes of paint and jars of brushes.
The room is where Eric Tucker, an artist virtually unknown until his death in 2018 but since compared to LS Lowry, painted people in the pub and on the street, gossiping, reading, smoking, playing cards.
Continue reading...Stencil image, which shows figure in nightgown and gas mask holding a fire extinguisher, was removed in Hostomel on Friday
Eight people have been detained over the theft of a mural painted by the elusive British street artist Banksy from a wall on the outskirts of Kyiv, Ukrainian authorities said.
The stencil image of a person in a nightgown and gas mask holding a fire extinguisher, next to the charred remains of a window in the town of Hostomel, went missing on Friday, they said.
Continue reading...Police make arrests and secure image of gas-masked woman in dressing gown sprayed on Hostomel wall
A group of people have tried to take a mural in Ukraine by the graffiti artist Banksy, by cutting away a section of war-damaged wall where it was sprayed.
The group managed to slice off a section of board and plaster bearing the image of a woman in a gas mask and dressing gown holding a fire extinguisher on the side of a scorched building.
Continue reading...Beckmann painted work in Amsterdam after fleeing Nazi Germany and shows him as younger man with enigmatic smile
A rare and remarkable self-portrait by the 20th-century German expressionist Max Beckmann has sold in Berlin for €20m (£17m), breaking the record for a work of art sold at auction in Germany.
The striking Selbstbildnis gelb-rosa (Self-portrait Yellow-Pink) was painted by Beckmann during his wartime exile in Amsterdam after he fled Nazi Germany. The identity of its new owner was not immediately available. With fees and other charges, the cost to the buyer was €23.2m.
Continue reading...The ruangrupa collective’s last show was removed from key German exhibition for caricatures of Jews
An Indonesian collective that became embroiled in an antisemitism row earlier this year has taken the No 1 spot in the annual ranking of the contemporary art world’s most influential people and organisations.
The ruangrupa group, founded in Jakarta in 2000, are the first artists from Asia to top the ArtReview Power 100. Their position “reflects the growing influence of the global south and the move towards greater diversity in the art world,” ArtReview said.
Continue reading...Art activism has increased in and outside the country since death of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini
Dozens of Iranian artists have called for an international boycott of cultural institutions run by or affiliated with the Islamic Republic in protest against the regime’s worsening human rights abuses.
The call by artists, writers, film-makers and academics living in Iran and among its diaspora comes amid growing anti-government art activism by Iranians inside and outside the country after the death of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini.
Continue reading...16th-century work Epifania is one of only two existing cartoons by the Italian master
One of only two surviving Michelangelo cartoons is undergoing delicate and highly technical conservation work at the British Museum in an attempt to stabilise the fragile work for the coming decades.
Epifania, created by the Italian master artist around 1550, has degraded and been subject to repeated repairs over its almost 500-year history. Now it is laid out in the museum’s state-of-the-art conservation studios as specialists consider how best to preserve the complex structure and black chalk lines.
Continue reading...Calls for construction on Museum of the 20th Century to be halted until energy efficiency issues addressed
A vast modern art museum under construction in Berlin has been castigated by conservation experts and architecture critics for its poor environmental credentials, as the energy crisis intensifies scrutiny of the efficiency of new buildings.
The Museum of the 20th Century, designed by the Swiss star architects Herzog and de Meuron, is intended to propel the German capital into the top tier of world cities for modern art, competing with New York’s Moma and London’s Tate Modern.
Continue reading...Artist’s choice of footwear for Order of Merit luncheon highlights shoe brand’s enduring popularity
It is a question that must have plagued those attending King Charles’s first luncheon for the Order of Merit on Thursday – what to wear while eating partridge pie with the new monarch.
For the 85-year-old artist David Hockney it was simple – his signature checked Savile Row suit, a knitted checkerboard tie … and a pair of yellow garden Crocs. As a fan of the great outdoors, the king was delighted. “Your yellow galoshes!” he remarked. “Beautifully chosen.”
Continue reading...Rarely seen work painted during artist’s Dutch exile from Nazi Germany has an estimate of €20m-€30m
A moody self-portrait of the 20th-century expressionist Max Beckmann painted during his Dutch exile from the Nazis is predicted to break the record for a price secured at auction in Germany when it goes under the hammer in Berlin next week.
Art lovers have been flocking first to New York and then to Berlin to see the painting in preview showings, which have offered a rare opportunity to view a masterpiece that has always been in private hands.
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