Instead of chastising family over breakage, director of the Hecht Museum invites them back
A rare bronze age jar – its history stretching back at least 3,500 years – had long graced the entrance of the Hecht Museum in Haifa, Israel, offering visitors a closeup look at an intact artefact believed to predate the biblical King David and King Solomon.
That is, until it was accidentally smashed by a four-year-old earlier this week.
Continue reading...Irish singer’s brother speaks of shock at ‘hideous’ figure which ‘looked nothing like her’
Dublin’s wax museum is withdrawing a figure of Sinéad O’Connor amid criticism from her family and members of the public that it looked “nothing like her”.
Many reacted with shock when the waxwork figure was unveiled on Thursday.
Continue reading...Artefacts sent by farmer, who made the ‘absolutely mad’ discovery while cutting silage
When the national museum of Ireland received two 4,000-year-old axe heads, “thoughtfully” wrapped in foam inside a porridge box, from an anonymous source last month, it put out an appeal. The objects were “significant” and “exciting”, it said, but experts needed to know more about where exactly they had been found.
Now they have their answer: a farmer from County Westmeath has come forward as the mysterious sender, saying he made the “absolutely mad” discovery while using a metal detector on his land.
Continue reading...Krusatodon kirtlingtonensis, which lived 166m years ago, ‘a piece of the puzzle’ explaining mammals’ success
The remains of a diminutive mouse-like creature that lived 166m years ago could help answer one of biology’s biggest questions of why mammals have become so successful, fossil experts say.
Krusatodon kirtlingtonensis belongs to the immediate predecessors of mammals and lived alongside the dinosaurs during the middle Jurassic age. But while it was originally known only from individual teeth, researchers have now reported two partial skeletons.
Continue reading...Museum has been plagued by numerous delays and has seen off almost 40 Italian governments
More than half a century and 39 Italian governments after it was first envisioned, a new museum will open later this year to house modern art from Milan’s Pinacoteca di Brera gallery.
The Brera Modern, just a few doors from the main gallery, has been plagued by numerous delays, most recently the discovery of asbestos and problems with the conditioning system.
Continue reading...Anna Lee Dozier bought ceramic vessel at Maryland thrift store but it will now reside in Mexico City’s main museum
Mexico has regained a lost ancient Maya vase because of a US woman who bought the artefact for less than $5 at a thrift store.
Anne Lee Dozier recently received an expression of gratitude from the Mexican embassy in her home town of Washington DC for her role in reuniting the 1,200-to 1,800-year-old vase with its motherland.
Continue reading...British Museum will host treasures from Samarkand in a bid to dispel cliches of camels, spices and bazaars
A monumental six-metre-long wall painting created in the 7th century, and 8th-century ivory figures carved for one of the world’s oldest surviving chess sets, are among treasures set to be seen in Britain for the first time.
The items will travel from the ancient city of Samarkand to the UK for an exhibition opening in September, as part of the first-ever loan from museums in Uzbekistan to the British Museum.
Silk Roads will be at the British Museum from September 26 2024 to February 23 2025. Tickets go on sale on Monday.
Continue reading...Indian high commission made claim bronze depicting Tirumankai Alvar which it believes may have been looted
Oxford University has announced it is to hand back a 500-year-old sculpture of a Hindu saint to India.
The almost 60cm-tall bronze statue, which depicts Tirumankai Alvar, had been on display at the university’s Ashmolean Museum.
Continue reading...Museum’s experts realised painter’s Ecce Homo had been misattributed in auction catalogue
Four centuries after it was painted, three and a half centuries after it arrived in Spain and three years after it came perilously close to going under the hammer for just €1,500, a lost, luminous and lovingly restored Caravaggio has gone on display at the Prado in Madrid.
The Ecce Homo, painted in the Italian master’s dark and desperate last years, made headlines around the world after experts at the museum spotted it in an auction catalogue and rang Spain’s culture ministry to share their suspicions that the painting had been misattributed.
Continue reading...American Museum of Natural History says Dr Lorenzo Prendini was working on research project and ‘has arrived safely home’
A curator at the American Museum of Natural History in New York who was detained in Istanbul on Monday while allegedly attempting to smuggle spider and scorpion samples out of Turkey has been released.
In statement on Thursday, a spokesperson for the museum said Dr Lorenzo Prendini, curator of arachnida and myriapoda, had arrived back in New York.
Continue reading...Collection of more than 1,000 fossils including rare dinosaurs given to National Museum in Rio six years after devastating blaze
Nearly six years after it was engulfed by a devastating fire that inflicted incalculable damage on Brazil’s cultural heritage, the country’s national museum has received an important donation of more than a thousand fossils as part of a campaign to help rebuild the collection lost to the flames.
The fire, caused by an electrical short-circuit on the night of 2 September 2018, consumed the former imperial palace which housed the 200-year-old museum in a park just north of Rio de Janeiro’s city centre and destroyed about 85% of its archive of 20m artefacts.
Continue reading...MP says trade in remains is ‘gross violation of human dignity’, as skulls from Pitt Rivers collection removed
An auction house has withdrawn 18 ancient Egyptian human skulls from sale after an MP said selling them would perpetuate the atrocities of colonialism.
Bell Ribeiro-Addy, the chair of the all-party parliamentary group on Afrikan reparations, believes the sale of human remains for any purposes should be outlawed, adding that the trade was “a gross violation of human dignity”.
Continue reading...Technician, 51, who hung his own picture in an exhibition about art world glitches, has been sacked and given a three-year ban
The first picture that greeted visitors to the first-floor exhibition space in Munich’s Pinakothek der Moderne gallery on 23 February may not have immediately grabbed their attention.
The 60cm by 120cm artwork was a retro-looking photograph of a family of four, with the background and parts of the faces and bodies roughly painted over in white. It was unassuming compared with the video- and photo-based artworks in the adjacent rooms, but only on closer inspection might visitors have wondered why there was no label giving the artist or the work’s title.
Continue reading...Staff member put work on display at Munich’s Pinakothek der Moderne ‘in hope of achieving his breakthrough’
According to a quote commonly – if wrongly – attributed to the artist Andy Warhol, everyone will have their 15 minutes of fame. At Munich’s Pinakothek der Moderne museum earlier this year, one technician and aspiring artist got to bask in the limelight for a whole eight hours.
The museum in southern Germany on Tuesday confirmed that it had fired a member of its technical services team after he was found to have hung one of his own paintings in a part of the gallery dedicated to modern and contemporary art, allowing him to share a space with works by pop art pioneer Warhol for an entire day.
Continue reading...Les Jeux Olympiques: Miroir des Sociétés opens ahead of Paris Olympics and puts previous games in context of conflicts and injustices
From the Nazi stadium propaganda in 1936 Berlin to the 1968 Mexico City podium protest of medal-winners Tommie Smith and John Carlos, who were expelled from the competition after raising their gloved fists in a Black Power salute against racial injustice, the Olympic Games have held a mirror up to some of the darkest moments of 20th-century history.
Now, as the Paris Olympics prepares to open this summer against a backdrop of war from Ukraine to the Middle East – with Emmanuel Macron saying Russia will be asked to observe a ceasefire in Ukraine during the Games – a new exhibition in Paris takes an unflinching look at the social and geopolitical impact of the Games over the last century.
Continue reading...Monuments erected on the Stadtschloss are an ‘infiltration’ of the city and its skyline by nationalists, say critics
Silently towering into the grey Berlin sky, the latest addition to the German capital’s skyline is easily missed by passengers passing along the Unter den Linden boulevard below. Eight statues of Old Testament prophets, each more than 3 metres tall and weighing 3 tonnes, were installed last week in a circular formation around the cupola of the palace in the centre of the metropolis.
Whether these wise men made of sandstone are mere innocent bystanders overlooking the ebb and flow of German history or warriors in a culture war over the country’s future, however, has been the subject of heated debate. Critics say the erection of Isaiah, Ezekiel and co is emblematic of the silent manipulation of a prestige architecture project by a shady group of donors with nationalist leanings.
Continue reading...Latin-inscribed artwork tells story of Walter Tirel, whose son killed British monarch
The Italian descendants of King William II’s killer want to donate a work of art partly depicting William’s death to a British museum.
The three-slab triptych is owned by the Tirelli family, whose aristocratic origins can be traced back to France, for over 400 years. They have said they believe it was made by a Norman artist in 1100.
Continue reading...Project to run during Women’s History Month at institutions including Tate Britain and Met in New York
Five big museums, including Tate Britain and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, are launching audio guides dedicated to underserved female artists in their collection during Women’s History Month.
Museums Without Men, devised by the Guardian art critic Katy Hessel, will showcase dozens of female and gender non-conforming artists who at present are often in the shadow of their male contemporaries.
Continue reading...Proposed sale of Abyssinian artefact taken during 1868 battle triggers appeal for restitution of ‘wrongfully acquired’ item
The Ethiopian government has called the auction of a looted colonial-era shield “inappropriate and immoral” as it attempts to stop its sale this week and prevent it from disappearing into a private collection.
The Anderson & Garland auction house, in Newcastle upon Tyne, was contacted by the Ethiopian National Heritage national restitution committee about the 19th-century Abyssinian shield, which it said should be removed from the auction set to take place on Thursday.
Continue reading...Mati Diop, the director of Dahomey, which charts the restitution of 26 objects to Benin, says the tiny number involved is ‘humiliating’
The first major return of looted treasures from Europe to Africa in the 21st century has left a lingering feeling of humiliation because of the lack of follow-up action, a French-Senegalese film-maker who accompanied a hoard of artefacts on their journey from Paris to their country of origin has said.
In her film Dahomey, which premiered at the Berlin film festival on Sunday, the director, Mati Diop, documents the 2021 journey of 26 treasures that the commander of French forces in Senegal looted from the royal palace of the kingdom of Dahomey, part of modern-day Benin, in 1890.
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