Archaelogists say Sumerian plaque dating from around 2400BC may have been looted
An ancient sculpture is to be returned to Iraq after it was secretly smuggled out of the country and offered for sale in the UK – only to be seized by the Metropolitan police.
The previously unknown Sumerian temple plaque, dating from about 2400BC, is being repatriated with the help of the British Museum, which first tipped off the police after spotting its planned sale in 2019.
Continue reading...Musée d’Orsay, home to some of world’s most famous nudes, apologises for barring visitor
One of Paris’s biggest museums, whose galleries feature some of the world’s most famous nudes, has been accused of discrimination and sexism after refusing entry to a woman in a low-cut dress.
In a case of life not imitating art, a zealous official told a literature student whose name was given only as Jeanne that “rules are rules” and ordered her to cover her cleavage if she wanted to be allowed into the Musée d’Orsay, a popular tourist attraction and bastion of the beaux arts.
Continue reading...The visionary architect behind some of the world’s favourite landmarks – and some of its most expensive housing – is hanging up his pencil. Our critic assesses his impact
Richard Rogers has never been the retiring type. He made his name with buildings that exploded their inner workings on to their outsides, dressing galleries and offices with rainbow symphonies of ducts and pipes. He became known for an equally colourful neon wardrobe, along with his love of public debate and bon viveur lifestyle. Now it seems the time has come for the 87-year-old architect to hang up his pencil: he is formally stepping down from the practice he founded more than 40 years ago.
Not that the pencil was ever Rogers’ favoured tool. He has always been, by his own admission, a terrible draughtsman, and he is dyslexic. He prefers to talk, ideally over a glass of wine and good Italian food. A tutor’s report from 1958 concluded: “His designs will continue to suffer while his drawing is so bad, his method of work so chaotic and his critical judgment so inarticulate.” Yet in his four decades in practice, and as an advisor to government, Lord Rogers of Riverside has probably influenced the face of urban Britain more than any other architect of the late 20th century.
Continue reading...Pieces of bone were turned into ornaments, and may have been placed on display
Bronze age Britons remembered the dead by keeping and curating bits of their bodies, and even turning them into instruments and ornaments, according to new research on the remains.
Archaeologists found that pieces of bone buried with the dead were often from people who had died decades earlier, suggesting their remains had been kept for future generations, as keepsakes or perhaps for home display.
Continue reading...Head of a Bearded Man revealed to be from same wood panel used for Rembrandt’s Andromeda
A tiny painting of a weary, melancholic old man long rejected as a fake and consigned to a museum basement has been revealed as one from Rembrandt’s workshop, and possibly by the man himself.
The Ashmolean museum in Oxford will this week put on display Head of a Bearded Man (c 1630) which was bequeathed to it in 1951 as a Rembrandt panel. In 1981, it was rejected by the Rembrandt Research Project, the world’s leading authority on the artist that effectively has a final say on attributions.
Continue reading...Among the many homes and buildings damaged by the Beirut explosion were the Sursock Palace and Museum. The 19th-century palace was once one of Beirut’s grandest town houses, and the mansion housing the museum was left to the city of Beirut in 1952
Continue reading...Video by Es Devlin and Machiko Weston tells story of nuclear bombing in Hiroshima and Nagasaki
A powerful 10-minute video artwork marking the 75th anniversary of the dropping of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki has been released by the Imperial War Museum in London.
The museum commissioned stage designers Es Devlin, who is British, and Machiko Weston, who is Japanese, to make the piece, which tells the stories and explores the impact of the bombings from different perspectives.
Continue reading...Gelsenkirchen bucks global trends with new monument as other cities confront relics of colonial past
While a global row rages over the controversial pasts of historical figures immortalised as statues, on Saturday a divisive new monument to the former Soviet leader Vladimir Lenin will be unveiled in Germany.
More than 30 years after the communist experiment on German soil that followed the second world war ended, the tiny Marxist-Leninist party of Germany (MLPD) will install Lenin’s likeness in the western city of Gelsenkirchen.
Continue reading...Anyone who digs up valuable treasure is supposed to report the find, not hang on to it or sell it to the highest bidder. But even under lockdown, crime continues
If you had seen them, you might have thought they were ramblers or dog walkers – locals snatching some fresh air as the nation hunkered indoors during lockdown. Only their equipment would have given them away: metal detectors, a shovel and a spade, that they humped uncomfortably up a vertiginous path.
They turned off the main road and drove a quarter of a mile down a single track dark with trees, past the occasional house and fields of rolling countryside. It was probably early morning when the car pulled up at a wooden fence, on which were carved the words “GRAY HILL, COMPTON”. From here, it is a stiff, scrambling climb up Gray Hill, towards a cluster of ancient standing stones that loom out of scrubland like broken teeth. Here, if the weather is clear, you can look out towards the Severn estuary.
Continue reading...Strict safety measures in place, as Colosseum and others also prepare to welcome visitors again
Some of Italy’s most famous cultural sites are coming back to life after being closed for more than three months as a result of the coronavirus pandemic.
The Leaning Tower of Pisa reopened on Saturday, the Colosseum and Vatican Museums will welcome visitors again from Monday and Florence’s Uffizi gallery from Tuesday.
Continue reading...While museums and galleries across the UK remain closed, cultural institutions abroad are beginning to welcome visitors as lockdown eases
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The British Museum has resurrected its blockbuster show about the deadly volcanic eruption. In the age of coronavirus, it’s more chilling and vital than ever
In AD 79, a society that thought it was modern, sophisticated and fully in control of its destiny was taught otherwise by nature. Sounds familiar? The eruption of Vesuvius that overwhelmed Pompeii, Herculaneum and many villas dotted around the Bay of Naples caught the Roman empire by surprise. The parallels with the coronavirus crisis are uncanny. So the British Museum’s release this week of Life and Death in Pompeii and Herculaneum, an online tour of its harrowing 2013 blockbuster show, offers a troubling gaze into history’s mirror.
Related: Life and death in Pompeii and Herculaneum – review
Continue reading...CCTV footage shows man strolling through exhibits at closed Australian Museum and posing for selfies with head inside mouth of T-Rex skull
A Sydney man will face court on Monday after allegedly breaking into Australia’s oldest museum and snapping selfies with the dinosaur exhibit.
The man broke into the heritage-listed Australian Museum in Sydney’s CBD just after 1am on Sunday 10 May, and was captured on CCTV cameras wandering around the exhibits for around 40 minutes, according to New South Wales police.
Continue reading...Thousands of works will disappear from galleries as rent rises and a stand-off with city government take their toll
Home to some 400 galleries and an estimated 8,000 artists, Berlin has long aspired to be what its politicians call the cultural capital of Europe.
Yet in the coming year, thousands of works by artists including Joseph Beuys, Louise Bourgeois, Bruce Nauman and Gerhard Richter are set to vanish from its galleries, as the city debates what lengths it should go to to protect art collectors from the sharp edge of a property boom.
Continue reading...Unique 2,000-year-old discovery made by staff in lockdown at Northumberland’s Vindolanda Museum
The Roman author Pliny the Younger advised “kissing the hairy muzzle of a mouse” as a cure for the common cold. His fellow countrymen linked mice to the god Apollo, who could bring deadly plague upon them with his arrows.
So they might not have seen the funny side of a lifelike mouse made out of a strip of leather which has been newly discovered at the Roman fort of Vindolanda, south of Hadrian’s Wall, near Hexham, Northumberland.
Continue reading...Lockdown delays restoration of The Night Watch, but it can be viewed online in ‘minute detail’
The Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam has posted online the most detailed photograph ever taken of Rembrandt’s The Night Watch, revealing every brushstroke and random fleck of paint.
The so-called hyper-resolution image was launched as the museum announced a delay to the completion of the painting’s restoration, which was begun last year and live-streamed to a global audience.
Continue reading...Locked-down institutions go online for Yorkshire Museum’s weekly ‘curator battles’
A zombie blowfish, a hideous mermaid and a lucky charm made out of a dead man’s finger are all competing to be crowned the creepiest exhibits in the world after an archaeological museum in the north of England challenged curators during the lockdown to showcase their most sinister objects.
Since its closure due to Covid-19 restrictions, the Yorkshire Museum in York has launched a weekly #curatorbattle on social media to challenge museums and visitors to put forward objects related to a particular theme.
Continue reading...In a district once ranked bottom for reading, the revamped attraction aims to awaken children to the joy of storytelling
For fans of children’s literature, it is an unmissable sight: Philip Pullman’s own alethiometer, a detailed realisation of the magical symbol reader described in Northern Lights, gleaming with secrets – or possibly even particles of “Dust” – on display at the new Story Museum in Oxford.
An unforgettable peek at the mysterious compass-like device is just one of the unique literary experiences on offer when the children’s museum reopens next month, after a £6m redevelopment.
Continue reading...With new museums opening in Africa, and calls for restitution increasing, old institutions are being forced to address the legacies of empire
Anthropology and archaeology were among the most important of the colonial disciplines. They derived their power from the trick of collapsing time and space. In his classic 1983 book Time and the Other, Amsterdam-based anthropologist Johannes Fabian described how this illusion operated. It was as if the further the colonial explorer travelled from the metropolis, the further back in time they went – until they found themselves, whether in Africa, Tasmania, or Tierra del Fuego, no longer in the present, but in the Stone Age.
Anthropology museums – which hold “world culture” collections – first developed in Europe, especially Germany and Britain, in the late 19th century. They were designed to realise these exoticising time-warps. In these places, the racist ideologies that sought to justify and naturalise European imperialism were institutionalised, helping create the idea of a distinction between “primitive art” and “civilisation”. Today the colonial mindset of European anthropology museums is being questioned and rethought – and we should all be paying attention.
Continue reading...Discovery of secret memos led to two-year search for 19th-century cultural treasure
Forty-five years after the Netherlands promised its return, a gold-inlaid dagger surrendered by a “rebel prince” after his failed 1830 uprising against Dutch rule in Indonesia has been handed back to Jakarta.
The kris, a dagger with a waved blade, was among a number of Prince Diponegoro’s belongings that the Netherlands’ vowed in 1975 to return, only for the priceless cultural treasure to go missing.
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