Category Archives: Art and design

Mystery behind Viking-age treasure find in Scotland may finally have been solved

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A runic inscription on one of the Galloway hoard’s elaborately decorated arm rings has been deciphered

When the Galloway hoard was discovered in a ploughed field in western Scotland in 2014, it proved to be the richest collection of Viking-age objects ever found in Britain or Ireland. Now the long-standing mystery of who might have owned it when it was buried more than 1,000 years ago may have been solved.

The spectacular silver and gold treasure had in fact belonged to everybody – “the community” – just as it does today, having been acquired in 2017 by National Museums Scotland (NMS).

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Beethoven and Marie Curie compete with birds to appear on new euro notes

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European Central Bank picks two themes for redesign submissions: ‘iconic personalities’ or rivers and birds

He was a master of notes, and now the German composer Ludwig van Beethoven could be one of the faces of the redesigned euro, the first time the EU currency’s banknotes have been revamped.

In a process that started in 2021 and has already involved a public inquiry and two multidisciplinary advisory groups, the European Central Bank (ECB) has selected two themes for the redesign.

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Louvre’s decision to move Mona Lisa is a misguided act of snobbery

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Crowds give life to the Paris museum and the painting is a silent, compelling mystery at the heart of the hubbub

What a wonderful headache for a museum to have. The Louvre in Paris gets so many visitors it is taking drastic measures to cope, which include moving its most famous treasure to a dedicated space where fans can visit without entering the main museum at all. It will no longer suck the oxygen from other art.

Nearly 9 million visitors a year stream through the Louvre and it’s believed 80% of them are looking for Leonardo da Vinci’s portrait of Lisa Gherardini del Giocondo, better known as La Gioconde, better still as the Mona Lisa.

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Stories woven in cloth in Pakistan’s first textile museum

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Nasreen and Hasan Askari open Karachi museum with her 1,000-piece centuries-old collection from trade crossroads

As a young medical student in 1970s Pakistan, Nasreen Askari had an encounter that would shape her for ever.

After asking the mother of a sick boy routine questions about his family history, the woman looked outraged. Marching Askari outside, she took off her colourful shawl and laid it on her lap. “Most of the answers to your pointless questions are here,” she said, pointing to intricate embroidery that symbolised everything, from the woman’s community, to her marriage status and her number of children.

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Carl Bloch’s lost masterpiece Prometheus Unbound finds fame again in Athens

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Work that made its creator a superstar then mysteriously disappeared is mesmerising art lovers once more

It was commissioned by a Greek king, made its creator a superstar and in his native Denmark attracted crowds like no other painting before. Then it mysteriously disappeared.

Now, nearly nine decades after it was last seen gracing the stairwell of the royal palace that would become the Athens parliament, Carl Bloch’s masterpiece, Prometheus Unbound, has found fame again in Greece.

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David Hockney unveils unseen work for major Paris retrospective

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Exclusive: William Blake-inspired artwork to feature alongside new paintings in artist’s biggest exhibition

A previously unseen painting by David Hockney has been revealed for the first time before its unveiling in the biggest exhibition to be devoted to one of Britain’s foremost living artists.

Titled After Blake: Less is Known than People Think, the work will be among hundreds of previously unknown Hockneys that are to be displayed alongside his famous masterpieces at the Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris from April.

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‘Homecoming’ show for artist Frank Auerbach to be held at Berlin gallery

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Exclusive: First show of figurative painter’s work to be displayed in city he fled in 1939 to escape Nazi regime

Frank Auerbach is to be the subject of what has been billed as a homecoming show in Berlin, at which some of his final paintings will be displayed in the city he fled as a child.

Auerbach, who died in November last year, never had a show in the city of his birth, which he left due to persecution by the Nazis. Both of his parents were later killed in Auschwitz.

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Oliviero Toscani, photographer behind provocative Benetton ads, dies aged 82

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Tributes paid to Italian known for images that drew attention to social themes including HIV/Aids and racism

Tributes have been paid to Oliviero Toscani, the Italian fashion photographer renowned for the provocative images used in Benetton’s advertising campaigns, who has died aged 82.

Toscani, who for two decades was the art director of the global clothing chain, died on Monday after being hospitalised close to his home in the Tuscan town of Cecina.

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Henry I’s luxurious tower at Corfe Castle reopens to visitors after 378 years

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A National Trust viewing platform at Corfe Castle offers visitors a glimpse into the king’s royal quarters in Dorset

A luxurious suite of “rooms with a view”, built for the son of William the Conquerer but partly destroyed in the English Civil War, has become accessible to visitors for the first time in almost 400 years, thanks to a new viewing platform at one of England’s most dramatically situated castles.

The King’s Tower was built in 1107 for William’s son Henry I at Corfe castle, which sits on top of a steep hill on the Purbeck peninsula near Wareham in Dorset. Constructed from gleaming white limestone inside the imposing fortification, the 23-metre tower was Henry’s personal penthouse, built to the highest standards of luxury and including an “appearance door” from which he could be seen by his subjects far below.

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Still life quartet by Dutch golden age master to be shown together in Cambridge

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Jan Davidsz de Heem’s four paintings of sumptuous food and luxury objects were produced as series

A quartet of influential still lifes from the Dutch artist Jan Davidsz de Heem will go on display together for the first time since the 17th century at the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge.

The four paintings were produced as part of a series by De Heem, who is considered to be a master of pronkstilleven – a style of ornate still life painting – during the Dutch golden age, depicting displays of sumptuous food and luxurious objects.

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Crypto entrepreneur eats banana art he bought for $6.2m

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Conceptual work created by Italian artist Maurizio Cattelan was sold at auction in New York last week

The cryptocurrency entrepreneur Justin Sun has fulfilled a promise he made after spending $6.2m (£4.88m) on an artwork featuring a banana duct-taped to a wall – by eating the fruit.

At one of Hong Kong’s priciest hotels, Sun, 34, chomped down on the banana in front of dozens of journalists and influencers after giving a speech hailing the work as “iconic” and drew parallels between conceptual art and cryptocurrency.

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Palestinian artists plan Gaza Biennale as ‘act of resistance and survival’

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Project involves showing work in Gaza but also sending works across Israeli siege lines for exhibiting worldwide

Palestinian artists in Gaza plan to stage a “biennale” exhibition as an act of defiance against Israel’s military onslaught and to focus attention on the plight of the territory’s 2.3 million people under more than 13 months of bombardment.

About 50 artists from Gaza will exhibit their work within the besieged coastal strip, and are looking for art galleries to host exhibitions overseas. But in order to hold their work to the eyes of the rest of the world, the artists are facing a unique challenge: how to get their art across Israeli siege lines.

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‘It’s been a lot of detective work’: Madame de Pompadour’s £1m wall lights discovered in Yorkshire hotel

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Four gilt-bronze sconces that lit up home of Louis XV’s mistress are set to go on sale at Sotheby’s in December

For almost 140 years, four massive gilt-bronze wall lights have hung in the 18th-century drawing room at Swinton Castle in Yorkshire, now an opulent luxury hotel.

Guests will almost certainly have noticed the one metre-high rococo appliques with their entwined branches decorated with leaves, berries and cherubim, and passed them off as impressive reproductions of more valuable original works.

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Armed gang steal jewels from French museum’s £6m ‘national treasure’

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Thieves fired shots and took parts of 1904 work by goldsmith Joseph Chaumet from Hiéron Museum

Armed robbers snatched jewels worth millions from a work by the famed Parisian goldsmith Joseph Chaumet classed as a national treasure, in a brazen heist at a French museum.

The thieves arrived on motorbikes at the Hiéron Museum in Paray-le-Monial, in central France, at about 4pm local time on Thursday. Three entered the building and one stood guard outside, said the local mayor, Jean-Marc Nesme.

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Prado show aims to highlight true colours of polychrome sculpture

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Madrid Exhibition intends to rescue the technique – coloured paint applied to statues – from centuries of indifference

In a darkened corner of the Prado, not far from an outsized crucifixion and a sculpture of a dead, recumbent Christ with eyes of glass, teeth of ivory and fingernails of horn, is another depiction of Jesus that is remarkable in its poignancy, its humanity and its history.

The tiny, painted terracotta scene, titled Los primeros pasos de Jesús (Jesus’s First Steps), is domestic rather than divine and shows a chubby, beaming infant ambling towards his equally beaming father. Its creator was the Spanish baroque artist Luisa Roldán who, despite becoming the first female sculptor to the royal court in 1692, is only now making her debut in the hallowed Madrid museum.

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Winning designs: the terraces and apartments designed to fast-track NSW housing

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State’s housing pattern book, launching in 2025, seeks to cut red tape and reduce development application times with pre-approved designs

Five winning terrace and apartment designs will be pre-approved in a new NSW government “pattern book” in a bid to fast-track housing development in the state.

The designs were selected from more than 200 in the state government’s Pattern Book Design Competition, submitted by architects from Australia and around the world.

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UK court sides with Icelandic firm over artist’s spoof corruption apology

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Judge considering complaint by fishing firm Samherji rules artist Odee unlikely to be able to defend work as parody

The property rights of Iceland’s largest fishing company prevail over the right to artistic expression of an artist who spoofed the firm’s website to draw attention to a high-profile corruption scandal, London’s high court has ruled.

For his 2023 work We’re Sorry, the Icelandic artist Oddur Eysteinn Friðriksson, who goes by the moniker Odee, copied the corporate identity of Samherji, a major supplier to Britain’s fish and chips industry, and uploaded on to the spoof website a statement titled “Samherji Apologizes, Pledges Restitution and Cooperation with Authorities”.

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British Museum receives record £1bn donation of Chinese ceramics

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Collection of 1,700 pieces dating from third to 20th century is highest-value gift of objects in UK museum history

The British Museum has been given a private collection of Chinese ceramics worth about £1bn, the highest-value object donation in UK museum history.

The 1,700 pieces dating from the third to the 20th century have been given permanently by the trustees of the Sir Percival David Foundation. They had been on loan to the London museum since 2009.

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Huge crime network forging Banksy, Warhol and Picasso uncovered in Italy

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Art police and Pisa prosecutor say 38 people being investigated, with about 2,100 fake artworks seized

Italian police have dismantled a Europe-wide forgery network suspected of producing sophisticated replicas of works by some of the world’s most famous artists, including Banksy, Pablo Picasso, Andy Warhol and Gustav Klimt.

Thirty-eight people had been placed under investigation in Italy, Spain, France and Belgium on suspicion of conspiracy to handle stolen goods, forgery and illegal sale of artworks, Italy’s art police and Pisa’s prosecutor’s office said in a joint statement on Monday.

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Andy Warhol prints stolen and damaged in ‘amateurish’ Dutch gallery heist

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Thieves steal two works after ripping them from their frames as they were too big for their car

Thieves have blown open the door of an art gallery in the southern Netherlands to try to steal four works from a famous series of Andy Warhol screen prints, but damaged them all and only managed to get away with two in the botched heist.

The gallery’s owner, Mark Peet Visser, said the thieves had attempted to steal the works from a 1985 series by the US pop artist called Reigning Queens, which features portraits of the then-queens of the UK, the Netherlands, Denmark and Swaziland, which is now called Eswatini.

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